Max "Bunny" Sparber

I SUPPOSE IF you're the son of a pharmacist and a pharmacologist, you're going to grow up with books like Richard R. Lingeman's Drugs from A to Z: A Dictionary. But that doesn't make it any less disturbing to discover the book when you're 10 years old.

Lingeman wasn't a doctor, you see, and Drugs from A to Z isn't the Merck Index, cataloging chemicals, drugs, and biologicals for the reference of physicians and other medical professionals. No, published in 1969 and authored by a journalist who had recently written about the East Village's burgeoning psychedelic underground for the New York Times, Lingeman's book looks to the Sixties drug scene for their chemicals of choice, their culture, and their language. You're not likely to find a medical pharmacopeia that includes words like "jab," defined as "to ambush someone," or "jasper," defined as "a lesbian."

What results is not so much a dictionary as it is a look at a heavily medicated underworld. Under the entry "crackers," we learn that "when Boston police became aware that LSD was being put on sugar cubes, users switched to putting it on animal crackers." Drawing on drug literature, as well as testimonials from users, doctors, and law enforcement, Lingeman's book has a long memory for American drug culture -- an entry for "wild Geronimo," explains that it is a drink "consisting of barbiturates dissolves in an alcoholic beverage," also explaining that the term comes from the 1940s.

The book is fascinating and terrifying, especially Lingeman's use of quotes from literature about the drug scene, which often consists of deadpan depictions of the seedier and more desperate end of drug use, such as William Burrough's explaining a "hot shot," or poisoned injection, from Naked Lunch ("he never got the needle out of his arm."), or this description of a heroin shot from Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book: "At the third attempt she found a vein and the blood rose up the needle and into the eye-dropper and appeared as a dark red tongue in the colorless solution."

As a boy, I found the book both terrifying and engrossing; I still do. I lost my father's copy years ago and recently purchased it again through Amazon.com, rereading it with the same nauseated fascination of my childhood. There is something about the subculture of drug addiction that is perversely attractive, and the book doesn't shy away from this. It doesn't need to. Among descriptions of the ecstatic experiences of drug use, there are entries on collapsed veins, agonizing withdrawals, terrifying overdoses, and long prison sentences. Drugs from A to Z might be the most effective anti-drug book ever written, because it is the most honest. It recognizes the real attractiveness of the drug culture, and the real pleasure that drugs produce, and, because the book does this forthrightly, when it also describes the drug scene as being rife with criminals, with diseases, and with broken and destroyed lives, you have to believe it. Whatever pleasures heroin might offer, for instance, by the time you finish the book, you're also going to be aware of the possibility of a "crater," a "gaping hole in the flesh at a vein caused by repeated intravenous injections of a drug at the same spot." ("It sure did look awful, though," according to Piri Thomas in the book Down These Mean Streets, quoted by Lingeman.)

Man, when you're 10-years-old, stuff like that leaves an impression.

When I got a little older, Nancy Reagan began her "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign, and, because of Lingeman's book, the campaign seemed misconceived to me, even though I was a boy. You can't tell people to say no to drugs. People love drugs. But if you tell them about what happens after using drugs for a while?

Tell them to just say no to craters. They'll listen to that.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

THOSE READING THIS BLOG might have gotten the mistaken idea that my fashion entries are some sort of perverse exercise in reclaiming hideous clothes. I assure you that this is not the case. You're not likely to see me wearing a cod piece anytime soon, or a cape. No, my interests lie in looking back at some truly superlative examples of male fashion from the past that have been unfairly ignored, or even have grown to be despised, despite the fact that they look great.

Look at these three gentlemen, as an example. This is a photo from Africa in the 1970s, according to its description on Flickr, and, in fact, the men are dressed in a type of ensemble that was pretty common back in the 70s, apparently worldwide. They're dressed in slacks, probably polyester, with belled bottoms, wide-collared shirts, probably also polyester (but for one, who wears a dashiki.) One of these young men wears a very wide belt, and two of them wear applejack hats. And I think they look fantastic.

It's hard to say why polyester fell into such ill-repute, but a backlash against the synthetic fabric began in the 80s after nearly two decades of increased market saturation. Polyester was lauded in the 60s as a space-age wonder fabric, and seemed to be the most popular fabric of the 70s, but suddenly became associated with cheapness and bad taste -- by people gauche enough to match their socks and ties and wore braided leather suspenders over striped blue shirts. It was a decade when men with mullets and stone-washed jeans (including jean jackets) would look back on the three young African gentlemen pictured at the start of this entry and turn up their nose, without a trace of irony.

As a result, it's awfully hard to find pants and shirts like those pictured, although I've been making a solid attempt. I have a few pairs of belled pants and big-collared shirts, all made from polyester. Expect to see more of them.

IF YOU'VE EVER APPEARED IN, or even watched, a production of Grease, you probably think you know what the Hand Jive is. Just play a Bo Diddley rhythm and move your hands in a simple, repetitive series of gestures, done double-time: slap your thighs, clap your hands, bump your fists together, wave your hands over each other, and wave your thumbs over your shoulders. Repeat, repeat, repeat, ad nauseum.

In fact, when the dance began, it wasn't quite so redundant. The advantage of the hand jive is that it is a dance that can be done while seated -- for example, while watching a band perform at an auditorium without a dance floor. Apparently, the dance was also popular around jukeboxes, where groups of girls might gather in close proximity.

I think the fact that it was done by groups of girls given a hint to what the original Hand Jive was like, as it was a lot more complex than the Grease version. If it can be compared to anything, perhaps it can be best compared to a game of patty cake, but that you play by yourself. Instead of one rather simple pattern of hand gestures, the Hand Jive had many -- perhaps hundreds. The version I am demonstrating here is from a live television performance of Johnny Otis performing his song "Willie and the Hand Jive"; he is accompanied by three rotund, smiling women who perform a series of Hand Jives, switching off every other verse.

Their version of the Hand Jive goes as follows:

FIRST SEQUENCE
Slap thighs twice
Clap hands twice
Cross wrists twice, to the left side and the right side
Twirl hands
Clap twice

SECOND SEQUENCE
This sequence acts as a sort of chorus, and is done between each other sequence

Cross wrists twice, to the left side and the right side
Touch elbows twice, to the left side and the right side
Twirl hands
Clap twice

THIRD SEQUENCE

Tap right thigh twice
Clap twice
Brush thumb to cheek or nose twice, to the left and to the right side
Twirl hands
Clap twice

SECOND SEQUENCE

FOURTH SEQUENCE

Swing arms across stomach
Swing arms out
Swing right arm across stomach, left arm up to ear
Swing arms out
Swing arms across stomach
Swing arms out
Swing left arm across stomach, right arm up

SECOND SEQUENCE

"THE LAST TIN MAN" is a limited edition print by San Francisco-based painter Eric Joyner, a fellow who specializes in paintings of tin robots and, for some reason, donuts. I bought this quite a few years ago, and, almost immediately afterward, started to see Joyner's work pop up everywhere, including on the cover of Spectrum 11: The Eleventh Annual Collection of the Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art.

This was one of the first pieces of art I purchased for myself that I still possess; I bought it about five years ago when I was living in Omaha, about the same time I bought "Wahini With Ukulele." With the Joyner piece, I think I was moved to buy it because I liked the painting's sense of a larger, hidden narrative. The painting looks to be an illustration that might have been part of a series, perhaps painted for a children's book. The image leaves a lot of unanswered questions: Why is there a giant robot hiding within a roadway? Why does he look like a child's toy? Who are the people who are talking to him? Where is this even taking place, anyway, seeing as the roadway looks disconcertingly like a Roman aqueduct?

Since the questions aren't answered in the painting, they leave the viewer the opportunity to concoct their own stories, and I appreciate that. It's pretty rare that art invites the participation of the viewer as directly as this one does, although I've often looked at still lives and wondered what happened that the people who were eating supper and arranging flowers had to get up and leave so suddenly. I've often imagined they were sitting down to an evening of pleasurable dining and floristry when there was the sound of squealing tires and a thud outside their doors, and they abandoned everything to run outside to witness a child, or perhaps a very old woman, trapped under the tires of a 1920s roadster. I'm not sure why I think this is the situation that would create a still life, but it's always what springs to mind. I mean, something made them leave their wine, their half-eaten fish, and their boutonnieres. My explanation is just as good as anyone else's.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

THE SETTINGS are as varied as 20th century America: the smoky darkness of a roadside bar, the wide-open expanse of an Interstate highway, the dank confines of a county jail, the perfumed sheets of a woman's bed, the mean streets of the city and the empty roads of the country.

And the people? They're the most outlandish, outrageous, and altogether real bunch you'll ever meet: high rollers and winos, tough guys and cowards, ladies and whores. It's all here in fiction as fast-paced as an 80-incher cranked to the max -- stories about the men who live to ride motorcycles and the women who love the men. Thirty-nine no-holds-barred tales of the outlaw breed who ride the highways of America in pursuit of freedom and adventure, stories of the biker and his unique lifestyle.

Inside these pages you'll enter the world of today's most celebrated individualist -- some call him the last American hero -- the biker.

There's a lot to love about this 1984 collection of short stories reprinted from the pages of Easyriders magazine, but I'm most glad I purchased it because it added this phrase to my vocabulary:

"She could stand with both feet flat on the ground and shit in a Dumpster."

More Dirty Books!

THIS 1962 FILM came very early in Shatner's career -- he had done quite a lot of television and stage work, but his screen appearances had been limited to small roles, albeit in rather impressive projects. He was a member of the Chorus in the 1957 production of Oedipus Rex, he appeared in 1958's The Brothers Karamazov as one of the brothers, and he played Spencer Tracy's briskly efficient military go-fer in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg.

For any aspiring character actor, these roles would demonstrate the start of an auspicious résumé. But Shatner was hungry for something more substantial, and, when the lead role in a low-budget black and white film opened up for him, he jumped at it. "I would have done it for free," he later admitted.

On the surface, the film he chose for his debut as a leading man seemed to be pure exploitation. Firstly, it was directed by Roger Corman, who was in the midst of lensing a string of arch and baroque adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe movies and was moving headlong into producing such fast and cheap cinematic fare as Night Call Nurses, Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia, and Big Bad Mama, which also featured Shatner.

And then there is The Intruder's potboiler storyline, in which a menacing figure invades a southern town on the eve of integration, fanning racial hostilities while bedding teenage girls and the wives of traveling salesmen. It sounds like exploitation, and especially crass exploitation at that, seeing the the south had only been forcefully desegregated a half-decade earlier, when Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock. Racial hostility was still murderous at the time The Intruder was filmed, and not a fitting subject to try and make a fast buck off of.

And The Intruder didn't make a buck. Until recently, it was notorious as the only Corman film not to turn a profit. The surprising thing about this, though, is that the film may not have done well because it was too good.

The Intruder features a script by a man named Charles Beaumont, who also appears in a small role. Beaumont was a writer with an impressive collection of television credits to his name, including penning 17 episodes of "Twilight Zone." Among these were such classics as "Living Doll," in which a father battles his daughter's toy, which has started to say things like "I am going to kill you"; he also authored "Long Distance Call," in which a boy uses a toy telephone to talk with his dead grandmother, and "The Howling Man," in which a stranger accidentally unleashes the devil from his captivity among a hermitage of monks. Anyone who ever watched "Twilight Zone" will remember these episodes with a pleasurable chill, and will understand when I say that Beaumont was one hell of a writer. Beaumont originally wrote The Intruder as a novel, and Corman so liked it that he set about to make it with admirable resolve: Turned down by the studios, he financed it himself.

The main character in The Intruder is a fellow named Adam Cramer, who we first meet riding into a sleepy southern town on a bus, dressed in a neat white suit and peering out the window through a mod pair of sunglasses. Cramer is played by Shatner, who was 31 at the time and seemed impossibly vital. He grins at everyone he meets, puppy dog friendly and instantly charming, even as he explains that he was sent by a right wing group in Washington, D.C., to organize extralegal protests against a high school desegregation that is about to occur.

Corman shot the film on location in several Missouri towns, and cast local townspeople in almost every secondary role, including a local high school football player named Charles Barnes, who plays an African-American youth who becomes the focus of the town's violent hatred, and bears it with a weary resignation that is heartbreaking. Corman was extremely crafty about how he shot the film, giving locals edited versions of the script so that they wouldn't suss out the film's eventual pro-integration viewpoint. Nonetheless, on the day he finished filming, Corman packed up his possessions and left wordlessly with his cast and crew, stealing out of town and fearing for his safety. He had reason to be nervous -- for one thing, he managed to find locals who, to the man, seemed toothless, ill-shaven, filthy, and thick-witted, as though Goya had painted a nightmare version of the south.

They look every bit the dangerous mob, and Shatner sets about stirring them up. His motivations are petty -- he clearly means to use these events as a steppingstone to a future as a career politician. He plays on the townspeople's native prejudices easily, gathering them in front of the courthouse and delivering a terrifying speech about Jews, communists, and blacks conspiring to destroy the south. In the meanwhile, he can't look at a woman without appraising her sexually, and when he seduces the wife of his neighbor in a cheap residence hotel, the man confronts him at gunpoint. The wronged husband is played by Leo Gordon, a towering, burly man, here playing a character with crass mannerisms and a nymphomaniacal wife. But Gordon is a natural salesman, and he recognizes Shatner for what he's selling, which is hate, and warns him he's selling it badly. There is no way Shatner can control the crowd once it turns into a mob.

And he's right. Shatner can't give a single speech without groups of long-john wearing men breaking off to harass black motorists, or set fire to churches. Shatner argues against violence, which he considers counterproductive, but everywhere he looks he sees men grinning at him with toothless grins while stroking lengths of rope. When a local newspaperman experiences a crisis of conscience and decides to walk with the black children to their school as a sort of quiet protest, he is immediately surrounded and beaten. Whatever Shatner's intentions, the tinderbox of racial tensions is too volatile for the theatrical but nonviolent protests he had envisioned. He's leading these people toward murder.

This is, arguably, Shatner's best film performance. It probably helped that he was a Canadian Jew playing an American racist -- another actor might have sought to find something sympathetic in the character, but Shatner plays his as a creature of unforgivable ambition. He takes oily pleasure in the trouble he creates, carrying himself with an arrogance that at first seems attractive, but then becomes insufferable. There's also an odd boyishness to the performance, which is often the case with Shatner: In one scene, he produces a pistol from his coat pocket and poses with it, alone in his hotel room, pretending to shoot and making gunshot sounds with his mouth, as though he were playing cowboys and Indians. When he is later confronted with that same pistol, by the enraged husband, his cockiness melts, replaced with a queer, desperate shame.

We see that same desperate shame at the end of the movie, when Shatner's schemes fall apart. The townspeople abandon him in disgust, and he races after them, calling out random racial epithets in a cloying, embarrassing attempt to win them back. It's one of the ugliest moments I have ever seen from an actor, a completely unsympathetic gesture of disgusting pettiness, and, as a result, the scene ranks among the most startling antiracist statements in the history of film. And it comes at the tail end of a film that has made an eloquent, unnerving case that racism effectively functions as a tool that petty despots can use to grasp at power, at a time when petty despots just like the one Shatner played were still clinging to power in Washington, and still fanning the raging flames of racism to scare up support. Hell, it still happens, still as nakedly and crassly, and it still works. It's no wonder this film didn't make any money.

More films of William Shatner.

I BEGAN WEARING Florida Water Cologne, which is credited to Murray & Lanman but is actually manufactured by Lanman and Kemp, when I lived in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. You couldn't go to a dollar store without seeing shelves filled with Florida Water, and a similar plastic bottle of Kölnisch Wasser called Rose Water, and, because it was cheap and I was curious, I bought both brands. I preferred the Rose Water, which might not seem an especially masculine choice of odors, but the main character in Peter Carey's 1981 novel Bliss, the white-suited and droopy mustached Harry Joy, wore rose hair treatment. He seemed a perfectly butch chap, especially as limned by Barry Otto in the 1985 film adaptation, and if the scent of rose was good enough for Harry Joy, it was good enough for me.

But Rose Water is harder to find than Florida, and eventually I switched over to this odd little bottle illustrated with a Victorian lithograph of the Fountain of Youth. This is a cologne with a very sweet floral smell, probably a combination lavender, jasmine, lemon, cinnamon, and musk, with a few other botanicals thrown in for good measure. Men's cologne tends to make men smell like forests or citrus groves, and tend toward the savory rather than the sweet, so Florida Water initially seems like something of an oddity in the world of Eau de Colognes.

And it is. You see, Florida Water isn't merely an element of the man's toilette. It's a ritual item used in a variety of Caribbean and Latin American folk religions, including Voodoo and Santeria. Aside from making a man smell nice, it also can be used to ritually purify, to perfume water used in shrines, and to splash in baths for good luck. Apparently it also repels insects.

But be careful. Florida water is also highly inflammable, leading to a tragedy a few years ago in New York in which a woman was doused in Florida Water as part of a ritual, and then an errant candle flame set her on fire.

There are few colognes that can claim to be this powerful, or potentially deadly. Although, if I can, I shall try to track down a bottle of Hoyt's Cologne, which is supposed to improve your luck at gambling.

THIS RATHER EXPRESSIVE ABSTRACT is one of the most unique in our collection, and desperately needs a frame to do it justice. You see, it was painted on commission for myself and Coco by a rather special artist. Firstly, he is a bona fide movie star, having costarred in a series of popular adventure films between 1936 and 1942. Secondly, he is a chimpanzee. And thirdly, at age 75 (soon to be 76), he holds the record for being the world's oldest non-human primate.

The artist is Cheeta. Yes, the very same Cheeta from the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies, who now luxuriates in a comfortable retirement in Palm Springs, playing the piano, flipping through books, watching his old movies, and painting. Sometimes I stare at Cheeta's bold compositional sense and fantasize about enjoying a similar retirement.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

CLARENCE MAJOR, who wrote this book back in 1970, back when people actually used the phrase "Afro-American," began his book with a warning. "In the specific case of Afro-American slang it is seldom realized that beneath the novelty or so-called charm of this mode of speech a whole sense of violent unhappiness is in operation," he wrote.

Major is a poet, and he wrote the book with a poet's ear for a meaningful turn of phrase. Unlike a lot of dictionaries that were written in the Seventies for the sake of entertainment, such as collections of CB slang, Major set out to create a document that reveals how language expresses a private social world. As a dictionary written at the tail end of the Sixties, released after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, coming after race riots in Philadelphia, Harlem, Watts, Cleveland, Omaha, Houston, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, Orangeburg, Baltimore, Chicago, Louisville, Washington D.C., York, and Jackson State, it was perhaps unnecessary to let us know that there was an undercurrent of anger in popular black slang.

But Major's book is more than just a document of rage. His ear for language stretches back as far as the 1920s, if not farther, and encompasses numerous groups, including criminal, political, and artistic -- there's quite a lot of the slang of the Be-Bopper here. And now, almost 40 years later, Major's book is also a document of lost words. Who knows how long it has been since one lover said to another "Don't make bah-nahn," meaning "Don't disappoint me." Even at the time of his writing, Major allowed that this was slang that might be limited to New Orleans. Nowadays, on the entire internet, the phrase only appears once, in a Google Books preview of the Dictionary of Afro-American Slang.

Here's a short list of a few of my favorite entries from the book.

Anxious: (1940s) a fine state of affairs; anything good
Axle grease: any stiff pomade for the hair
Bale of straw: a white, usually blond female
Beast: the white man; white people
Birdwood: (1940s) marijuana
Blow-your-mind-roulette: a game wherein a variety of pills are thrown on a table or in the middle of the floor in a dark room and the players grope for and swallow the pills they find. Then they wait for their own reaction to see what they've chanced upon.
Cannibal: one who indulges in oral-genital sex
Circus love: an orgy
Dream box: the human head
Gorilla pimp: a stupid, crude, tactless hustler
Jersey highball: (1940s) cow's milk
Kong: home-made whisky
Repent pad: (1940s) a bachelor's apartment where a girl may be led to engage in an act she may later regret
Soul on: phrase of encouragement to one to continue to be authentic
V-8: (1940s) an unfriendly female

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

IT'S EASY TO MAKE FUN of the Seventies, and people do it all the time. It's a decade that tends to be treated as one that consisted of nothing but preposterous fads, fashion excesses, and post-hippie, proto-yuppie self-indulgence. A lazy comic need only toss around a few key words, such as EST, platform shoes, and pet rocks, to get a knowing smirk from an audience. And one of the favorite subjects used to make sport of the Seventies is the Leisure Suit, which is treated as perhaps the greatest fashion faux pas of an especially hideous decade.

The irony is that these very derogatory comments and smirks are generally coming from men who can't seem to be bothered to wear anything but ill-fitting blue jeans or slacks and a hoodie, or, at best, a sweater. We're a generation of men who have transformed the baseball cap into universal male headwear. What have we contributed to fashion but for a strange, far-from-universal tendency to wear our pants low enough to show off our underwear, a habit borrowed from prison bitches? There has never been a blander time for male couture, and yet we have the audacity to look back on the Seventies and poke fun.

The Seventies were the last gasp of real adventure in the male wardrobe of the masses, a time when even JC Penny's carried dazzling selections of brightly patterned shirts, bell-bottomed pants, nehru jackets, wide plastic belts, and applejack hats. It was a time when it was hard to tell the difference between a business executive and a street corner heroin dealer. It was a time when designers were bold enough to briefly revisit one of the most conservative elements of the man's closet, the suit, which has, for the most part, not changed significantly since the 19th century.

We live in a time when, except in certain professions, the suit has almost totally been abandoned as the requisite wear of the business professional. In fact, it has gotten so hard to get some men into a suit that they won't even wear one for a wedding, opting instead for slacks and a button down shirt, sans tie, as though they were petulant children who will not dress for church. This wasn't the case in the Seventies. Everybody from school teachers to drugstore clerks were expected to show up to work in a monkey suit. And yet it was a time when men generally wore their head a bit shaggier, grew out sideburns and mustaches, and generally loosened up from the styles demanded by the crew-cutted 50s, the result of the Sixties counterculture moving mainstream. These were men who no longer went straight home from work to supper with the family and then watch the evening news and Johnny Carson before bed. Heck, even Johnny Carson was getting pretty wild, with wide-lapeled coats and polyester slacks. And the everyday businessman might well be wife swapping or hitting a disco on his way home, and the monkey suit was just too square for that scene.

And so the leisure suit was invented, consisting of a matching polyster jacket and pants, generally in the preferred Crayola palette of the era, which included oranges, mustards, and burnt umbers. If you were lucky, the leisure suit had white stitching or piping, and bell bottoms. You could button it up with a fat striped tie under it by day, and then, on your way out from work, take off the tie and unbutton both jackets and shirt, revealing a hairy chest and gold chains. It was the perfect outfit for the real decade of the sexual revolution, at once dressy and casual, the official uniform of swingers everywhere. It's no wonder this particular item of costume is now mostly associated with a vaguely pornographic video game, Leisure Suit Larry.

Nowadays, if the leisure suit is seen at all, it is worn for its kitsch value, which is a pity. There really is only one decade men can look back upon for real sartorial adventures, and, unfortunately, it is the most despised ten years of the 20th century, as though the Eighties, which draped men in power suits and pastels and argued that greed is good, was somehow preferable.

FAD DANCES from the Sixties can have some pretty boastful songs to accompany them. After enough of them, you start thinking, all right, just sing about the Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop, I'll syncopate my last two steps, and then I'll decide if the moves are amazing enough to put me in a daze. You just don't want to be bullied into feeling like you have to have a good opinion about a fad dance.

However, when it comes to The Mashed Potato, I'm inclined to agree with singer Dee Dee Sharp. It may no longer be the latest, but it may very well be the greatest, and it's certainly outta sight.

This dance might be loosely related to The Twist -- both make extensive use of twisting the legs back and forth. But, beyond that, the dance is quite different. Firstly, in The Twist, both legs turn the same direction at once. With The Mashed Potato, the legs go opposite directions, and it incorporates a little kick. Quite different. This sort of heel swivel actually dates back to the 20s -- it is one of the essential moves of the Charleston, the first great fad dance of the 20th century.

Here's how it's done: Start with your feet apart, about 12 inches, but with your knees and toes turned in.

Now swivel your heels in so that your knees and toes are pointed out, placing your weight on your right foot.

Now swivel your heels so that your knees and toes are pointed in. Swivel by placing your weight on the front of your foot.

Now swivel your heels in so that your knees and toes are pointed out.

Swivel them in again, this time lifting your left foot slightly.

Now you reverse these directions, this time putting your weight on your left foot and lifting your right foot.

It takes some practice, and it's exhausting. Forget The Twist, which Chubby Checker claims lost him 30 pounds after three weeks of demonstrating the dance. This is a real workout. The timing is as follows: One and two and, one and two and, etc.

Here I am demonstrating the dance. I'm still trying to develop the bodily strength to get really fancy with the dance -- some dancers kick with every other swivel, and some bounce as they dance, almost as though they are doing some wild version of The Pony. I just don't have the strength for that. But this will give you a good sense of the essentials.

SHATNER IS SECOND-BILLED in this Roger Corman redneck sleazefest from 1974, but he doesn't show up in it until about halfway through. Prior to that, we're treated to a rather rambunctious exploitation ripoff of Bonnie and Clyde, with Angie Dickinson as the West Texas mother of two nubile jailbait daughters. One of the girls is played by a lanky blond named Susan Sennett, who went on to do almost nothing at all, but the other is played by Robbie Lee, a petite brunette who would go on to earn trash immortality as Lace, the leader of the girl gang the Jezebels in 1975's Switchblade Sisters. Big Bad Mama is a film that features a lot of female nudity, but even in a film featuring a superabundance of feminine pulchritude, Lee's toplessness seems excessive. There doesn't seem to be a single scene without her bosoms spilling out of her loose-fitting dresses, which lends the whole film a creepy, almost pederastic vibe, especially as Lee often clutches an oversized doll.

Big Bad Mama is set during the great depression, or at least the great depression of tens thousand pornographic pulp novels inspired by the success of Baby Doll, in which tumescent good old boys leer at nymphomaniacal but childlike teens. Angie Dickinson, to her credit, seems to really enjoy her role, pointing pistols at tent revival priests and socialist-hating war veterans when they start pawing her daughters. In fact, Dickinson is pretty fast to toss of her own clothes, especially when she partners with a bumbling bank robber, played by a very young Tom Skerritt.

The film is really Skerritt's whenever he's on the screen -- he shows a taste for physical comedy he wouldn't really show again. He never enters a scene, but bangs into it, tumbling down the side of hills or tripping through doors. He's a bundle of angry energy, unable to hold still for a moment, frequently tossing whatever he has in his hand at whoever he happens to be angry at. Then, at one point, he climbs into bed with both of the film's nubile teens, and both girls strip their clothes off, which, one imagines, is the reason Skerritt took the role in the first place. Whatever the case, he is far better than he has any reason to be, especially in a film that is really nothing more than grotesque tableaux of redneck caricatures.

In fact, for the first half of the film, it's hard to imagine how Shatner will fit in. The men in the film are universally disgusting, including a small-town sheriff whose clichéd love of donuts is played so broadly that his face and uniform are smeared with jelly, and flies circle him hungrily. But then, at a horse race, Shatner appears, playing an apparently well-heeled Virginia gentleman named William J. Baxter. He oozes an exaggerated southern charm, smoking cigarettes from a holder and speaking in a "let's have our mint juleps on the veranda" accent. Dickinson instantly falls madly in love with him, but he just as quickly proves to be a small-time con man, broke and nervous and drunk. It's one of Shatner's first "weak man" roles; he played a string of characters through the 70s who were defined by moral cowardice, infantile emotions, and bouts of drunkenness. And he's hilarious in these roles, brooding and cowering in the corners of movies, looking bewildered and humiliated in scene after scene.

He soon becomes the whipping boy of this film. Despite the fact that he is Dickinson's erstwhile lover, demonstrated in a notorious scene that has both naked in bed together with Shatner behind Dickinson, stroking her with inept eagerness, almost everybody takes a fast dislike to his character; Dickinson herself refuses to call him Bill, despite his repeated requests, instead referring to him as Baxter, which sounds somewhat insulting when she says it. He does very little but complain that he is temperamentally unsuited to the life of crime they've dragged him into, and begs Dickinson for money for vague financial scams. Eventually, he betrays the group when they kidnap an heiress, leading to the movie's requisite climactic shootout.

Shatner does have one absolutely magnificent moment in the movie. Toward the end, the bound heiress begins begging to be brought to a bathroom, and Skerritt demands Shatner take care of it. But he wants no part of the scene, and refuses. Skerritt, as he is wont to do, throws some food at him, and Shatner spins toward the younger man in a rage, grinning wildly. "Goddddddddddd. Daaaaaaaammmmmmn. Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit," Shatner call out, stretching each word out to preposterous lengths. Honestly, he seems to go on for a minute. This is the one moment when Baxter shows any gumption at all in the movie, and, apparently, Shatner decided to make it last. It's short lived, though. Shatner throws his arms up in a boxer's stance and challenges Skerritt, who responds by pointing a gun in Shatner's face. Shatner instantly deflates, an expression of helpless shame flashing across his face.

It's a moment that Shatner would later excel at, creating buffoonish characters who have moments of surprising complexity -- these qualities pretty much define Denny Crane, his blustering attorney from Boston Legal, for which he has won two Emmys. In this one moment, when Shatner faces Skerritt's pistol, we see a man who knows he should have too much pride to endure this sort of petty humiliation, but doesn't, and can't stand it. And that's a pretty sophisticated characterization for a film that trades mostly in bumpkin humor and cheaply exposed female flesh.

More films of William Shatner.

THE RULE OF THUMB, when it comes to men's fragrances, is the following: If you can smell it on yourself, you've used too much.

Ignore that advice. The really entertaining men's toilette items tend to pack a punch, and keep on packing it. Pinaud-Clubman's After Shave Lotion, as an example, can be smelled throughout the room upon opening. Pat some on your cheeks, and you can expect people to notice the smell for the next few days. It's a smell that anyone who has been in an old-school barbershop will recognize -- a citrusy scent with a bite of alcohol. It's the sort of stuff that barbers named Bender have on hand, former military men who learned to cut heads while in the Marines and tend to offer two styles of haircut: too short and combed over. They shave the back of your neck and then out comes the aftershave, and it's not like today's stuff. No, modern aftershaves tend to be soothing lotions filled with healing and moisturizing botanicals, such as aloe vera, and leave modern men smelling like an expensive salad. Instead, these are the aftershaves that are meant as astringents and antiseptics, as though shaving was field surgery. They burn going on, an experience the manufactures cover with tougher-sounding buzzwords, such as "bracing" and "invigorating."

But there's something about these antiquated aftershaves that are irresistible. They stink, yes, but it is a stink of an older time of masculinity, when men smelled like this. I remember the smell from my childhood. It's what my uncles smelled like, who were cranky middle-aged Jewish men with gold rings, who dressed up by wearing black ties over black shirts, who magnanimously paid for movies and dinners out and trips to the zoo with neatly folded wads of bills held in place by a money clip. They smelled like what adulthood smelled like, and doesn't anymore.

THE SEVENTIES just wouldn't have been the Seventies without the three-quarter length leather jacket, preferably in chocolate brown, double-breasted, with flyaway collars and extensive piping. There's just something about this jacket that suggests its wearer is in for a night of collecting overdue payments, generally accompanied by a baseball bat and an enormous man with a menacing nickname. Louie The Pig, perhaps, or Broken Nose Johnny.

Alternately, depending on the neighborhood, the wearer of this jacket, tailored by Campus's Leathers Ltd., might be seen leaping out of a gold-plated Cadillac DeVille, wearing an enormous red fedora, brandishing a snub-nosed revolver, and calling out to a woman in hot pants that she had better have his money by tonight.

THIS COCKTAIL is to Scotch what the Galliano Kir is to white wine -- it's just one essential alcoholic beverage spruced up with a dash of Galliano. Specifically, you add 1/4 oz Liquore Galliano to 2 oz Scotch Whisky, stir with ice, and serve with a twist of lemon. Now, I did this with The Balvenie, a 15-year-old single-barrel, single-malt Scotch, and, honestly, that sort of Scotch is already a connoisseur's drink, so there was no real need to ever mix it with anything at all. But I made up an an Italian Heather for the sake of experimentation, because sometimes risks must be taken in the pursuit of adventure.

Happily, the addition of Galliano did not ruin the Scotch. All the things you want when you drink Balvenie remained -- specifically, the sharp attack, the sophisticated honey and spice flavors, the peat, and the long finish. On the other hand, adding the Galliano was completely unnecessary, and, in fact, the strength of the Scotch dimished the flavor of the Galliano by quite a bit, in part because so little Galliano is used, and single malt scotch has such a strong flavor. It did sweeten the Scotch, however, almost to the level of an Irish Whiskey. I could imagine this being a popular drink for people who want to enjoy blended Scotch but think it tastes like moss, and for Scotch snobs who have been given a bottle of Cutty Sark, which is just sitting there next to bottles of Glenlivet and Macallan. You're never going to pour that Cutty Sark over ice and enjoy it that way. Go ahead, have a little fun with it -- toss in some Galliano.

More Galliano cocktails.

HOW DOES ONE go about breaking into the field of the flatulist? In the case of Joseph Pujol, known by his stage name Le Pétomane, which roughly translates as "the fart maniac," it was a childhood discovery. Swimming in the sea, he ducked under and held his breath, and instantly felt a rush of cold water into his bowels. He could pull water into his rectum at will! He soon discovered he could do the same with air, and one of the most celebrated careers on the Moulin Rouge was born -- at the height of his fame, Le Petomane was paid more than the Divine Sarah Bernhardt. Pretty impressive for a man whose sole talent was the ability to fart on command.

This slim volume on the life of Pujol was published in 1967. I discovered it 21 years later at a used bookstore in west Los Angeles, and initially balked at its price: $14.95. But every time I returned, there it was, with its grand Victorian-era photo of the flatulist staring down at me, musical notes pouring out of his backside. Eventually I decided I would be a fool to pass up such a book, broke down and spent the money, and have never regretted it. I especially enjoy a handwritten note, scribbled in blue ink,on the book's first page. "We think we're great -- " it reads. "Here's a guy who could do more with his asshole -- Merry Xmas Clark!"

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

I DON'T KNOW who first got the idea to mix together petroleum and mineral oil, or why they decided to rub it in their hair, but they transformed masculine fashion. After all, they created pomade, which apparently also once contained chunks of apple (pomme in French), because who hasn't looked at an apple and thought to themselves, man, I bet that would make my hair stiff and shiny!

Pomade had a good run, slicking back Valentino's hair in the 20s and rockabilly's pompadours in the 50s and 60s, but the 70s brought with it Gilette's The Dry Look, which allowed men with longish hair to look as though they had just driven 20 miles in a convertible or on a motorcycle and were ready to sing backup vocals on a Peter Frampton album. That was pretty much it for pomade -- it became the stuff your grandpa wore, although certain ethnic enclaves kept the stuff in business. Obviously, among these were African-Americans, as Murray's Superior Hair Dressing Pomade is illustrated by two clip art line drawings of a man and a woman with luxurious afros. Pomade has been used in African-American hairstyles as diverse as the conk, where it cemented hair into a thick helmet, and the afro, which gains extra body from a light coating of pompadour.


Then there are folks like me, whose type-6 male pattern baldness leaves us looking as though we had deliberately shaved our heads into a monk's tonsure, and, as a result, must keep our hair very short or risk looking like an experiment in static electricity. Thank goodness for pomade, which gives is the opportunity to grow our hair out and then paste it down onto our head in a style I like to call the Gerald Ford.

Here's the thing about pomade, though. It doesn't wash out. Not unless you want to douse your head with a de-greaser, such as olive oil or Coca Cola. But it's a small price to pay to look this good.

GENERALLY, A SHATNER FILM will be a little stranger because he is in it. He has a tendency to just let his character's emotions burble over, in a way that is often embarrassingly intimate. He was a very good-looking man in the 60s, with an easy smile and an engagingly cocksure manner, and so it was always a little startling when he would become a gibbering, howling mess. He often limned his character's emotional displays as though he had reverted back to childhood, and so his most dramatic scenes seemed a lot like tantrums. It's what made season three of Star Trek endurable. The series suffered its worst scripts during its final season, but at least they kept Kirk freaking out in episodes such as "Day of the Dove," in which an alien force drives Kirk (and the rest of the crew) into endless brutal combat, and "Turnabout Intruder," in which Kirk's body is taken over by an insane woman.

Alas, there is precious little burbling from Shatner in 1965's Incubus, a film he made just before he began his role as Kirk. There is some, to be sure, especially at the end, when grief causes Shatner to howl at the sky, but it's brief. Never mind, though, as Incubus is a strange enough film that it doesn't really need excessive Shatner histrionics. For one thing, the film is shot entirely in Esperanto, an invented tongue that was intended to be a universal second language. Incubus is sometimes promoted as being the only film shot entirely in Esperanto, but this isn't true. Just a year before the lensing of Incubus, a film called Angoroj was made, which told of life among Paris's criminal underworld. This film is hard to track down, as it did rather poorly, and its creator, in a fit of depression, destroyed nearly every copy.

Incubus very nearly suffered a similar fate, and has long been considered a cursed production, as its cast suffered a string of murders and suicides in the years that followed. The movie itself was considered lost for many years, until a copy was rediscovered at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and remastered in 2001. So let that be a lesson to any aspiring filmmaker who is considering making a movie in Esperanto, and that lesson is, man, think twice.

Incubus is generally promoted as a horror film, but feels more like a folk tale. It tells of a family of female demons who live by a legendary well, one that is reputed to heal the sick. These demons prey on the broken humans who come to the well, seducing them into sin and then drowning them in the ocean. One of these demons, Kia, complaints that it is too easy to take the souls of the sick, as they are already destroyed, and longs for the challenge of seducing and destroying a saint. Her sister warns her that saints have a way of making you fall in love with them, which would be bad news for a demon.

Ignoring her sister's advice, Kia sets her sights on Marc, a wounded soldier played by Shatner. They frolic for a while, and then the demons set about in their task of ruining the man, which they do by abusing his sister. Here's where the Shatner burbling comes in, as he staggers around in a murderous rage, which the demons encourage, as, if he were to take a life in revenge, Marc would be condemned. Alas, Kia has fallen in love with him at this point, and the demons turn on her by having her assaulted by a male demon in the form of a goat.

The film is rather exquisitely lensed, thanks to the fact that Conrad Hall was hired as cinematographer -- he would later go on to win Academy Awards for his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Road to Perdition, and American Beauty. Incubus is shot is stark black and white, deliberately evocative of the early works of Ingmar Bergman, especially The Seventh Seal. Although there is little genuine horror in Incubus, Hall created one image that is legitimately terrifying. In the background of severals scenes, in the smoke-filled skeleton of an incomplete or ruined building, an enormous figure watches the action, occasionally stretching enormous, batlike wings.

The film was created by Leslie Stevens, who was also responsible for The Outer Limits, and he chose to film in in Esperanto for two reasons. Firstly, because he felt a story such as this would benefit from being told in a strange tongue, and he's right. The film's use of Esperanto makes the story seem that much more like a folk tale told in an alien land. Secondly, Stevens noticed that there was a growing market for foreign-language films in American art house theaters, and he hoped to tap into that, and this is the strangest element of Incubus -- that Stevens was essentially making a foreign film in Northern California, using Hollywood actors.

It works. The cast speaks their dialogue with conviction, never seeming as though they had simply memorized lines in an invented language. Allyson Ames, who plays Kia, is especially good: A knockout blond who hailed from Dallas, she speaks the film's dialogue as though she had grown up in some country that had forgotten its native language and turned to Esperanto in desperation. Weirdly, Shatner, who actually is bilingual thanks to a childhood in Montreal, overplays his Esperanto slightly -- he throws in little hand gestures that seem designed to demonstrate that he knows what he's saying. If he mentions a tree, he'll point right to the tree, just to show that he knows that he's talking about that very tree. Otherwise, Shatner mostly smiles amiably throughout the film, and, when he meets Kia, flirts with her outrageously. He does this in a manner than will be very familiar to Star Trek fans -- he gets his face very near hers and speaks very softly while looking off into the distance, as though he hadn't noticed that his face how somehow gotten into kissing distance, but were instead an accident. Kia, confronted by Shatner's visage (his Big Giant Head, if you will) in this manner, does as legions of alien women would do in the next few years. She falls madly in love.

More films of William Shatner.

SO THERE WAS A FELLOW named Félix Kir, who was a Frenchman who helped pioneer the "twinning" movement, in which cities across the world pick sister cities based on similar qualities, such as geography or demographics. It's like a pen pal program, although I don't expect the city's mayors spend a lot of time writing each other letters, although, were I mayor, I would.

Minneapolis has eight sister cities around the world: Eldoret, Kenya; Harbin, China; Ibaraki City, Japan; Kuopio, Finland; Novosibirsk, Russia; Santiago, Chile; Tours, France; and Uppsala, Sweden. I've often thought it would be fun to find one person in each town and write letters back and forth, or, since this is the 21st century, emails. Perhaps I shall do so for this blog, which feels as though it needs an international element, as I have always fancied myself something of an international playboy, although without much justification.

However, I mention the twinning movement here because it inspired the popularity of the cocktail that bears Félix Kir's name. I speak, of course, of the kir, which is a mix of blackcurrant liquor and white wine. It was a drink that already had some popularity in Kir's town of Dijon in Burgundy, where he was mayor, and where it was called blanc-cass. After World War II, Kir began to bring delegates from his town's sister cities, and he would offer them the cocktail, which conveniently was made of two products of Burgundy. So his name became associated with the drink around the world, except, one presumes, in Persia, where the word kir means whang.

The Galliano Kir swaps out the blackcurrant liquor for Galliano -- you just dump about 1/4 oz Liquore Galliano into a wine glass and then top it off with chilled white wine. I was initially skeptical of this drink, as it seemed a variation of the Sparkling Galliano, which I found too sweet. But I picked a dry white wine and this recipe calls for less Galliano, and the combination is dynamite. The Galliano sweetens the dry white wine, but just slightly; you hardly notice it's there. Instead, it seems as though the wine itself had somehow decided today was the day it was going to be extra-delicious. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. After all, this is the way Galliano is generally used, as a subtle additive to existing drinks. But I did not expect it would work this well with wine.

We essentially inhaled the bottle, and, sometime over the course of the evening, decided Eda Cherry should be called Coco, and our mutual friend Michelle would from here on out be known by her nickname Ginger, and we decided that our other friends needed better nicknames, although we were hard-pressed to concoct any. I began to wonder if I shouldn't encourage people to call me by my longtime nickname of "Bunny," which has only been used by girlfriends, but I rather like, in part because it is a nickname I share with actor Bunny Breckenridge, who was played by Bill Murray in the Ed Wood biopic. I also share the name with Bunny Yeager, a photographer who famously lensed Bettie Page. And doesn't Bunny and Coco sound like an excellent pair of names for a couple?

So this is where your conversations end up after drinking a few Galliano Kirs, and I must say, I approve.

More Galliano cocktails.

THIS LOVELY LADY, called "Wahini with Ukulele," is by German artist Thor Hasenkamm, and has had a place of pride on my walls for four or so years. It's also one of the reasons I never invite people to bring their children to my apartment, as it is a small, but telling, example of the fact that Casa Ultramod, as we call it, is not even remotely childproof. By this, I don't mean that a child is likely to eat drain cleaner or stick a finger in a socket, although that is a possibility. No, I mean that my small apartment is so thoroughly a product of the adult experience that it would take forever to stash away various items that might not be appropriate for a child's eyes.

And I'm not talking about pornography, although there is that. I'm imagining a scenario in which a wee nipper is left unattended for a moment and uncovers my selection of books of crime scene photographs from the 40s and 50s. In just an instant, the child might see lurid black and white images of besuited men face down in barrooms, collapsed in a pool of their own welling blood, while on other pages the child might discover the hideously strewn bodies of car crashes and the grotesquely distorted visages of suicides. I would not want to be responsible for the conversation that this would necessitate.

Hell, I would even want to be responsible for a parent's discussion with a child about the small, perfect circles of bosoms on this long-haired, yellow-skinned ukulele player.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

THE FRUG (pronounced froog) isn't much of a dance, truth be told. It's reported to be an offshoot of The Twist, and a weirdly lazy offshoot. After all, all you do in the twist is sashay with your hips and your feet. This dance removes the feet. That's right, the entire dances consists of moving your hips from side to side, a technique called "Latin motion" in ballroom dance circles. A lot of men have trouble with this move, as they are only used to pumping their hips forward and backward; trust me, gents, there is more than one compelling reason to learn to move your hips from side to side.

I include the Frug here because it grew into a few other dances, just by the addition of arm movements. There are endless variations on the theme of swiveling your hips and moving your arms, including The Hitchhiker, The Swim, The Crawl, which I will demonstrate in the future. For now, enjoy the rather laconic and repetitive dance that is The Frug.

ONCE YOU GET USED to Galliano's anise and vanilla flavors, the other ingredients really start to announce themselves -- and there are a lot of them, including peppermint, ginger, coriander, lavender, juniper, musk yarrow, and cinnamon. It's a very complicated flavor, and it's no wonder Galliano is most often used as a subtle addition to other cocktails, giving them a richer and more complex flavor. You can take almost any cocktail "to the wall," as bartenders used to say, by adding a dash of Galliano, and it will be improved.

But Galliano is a strong medicine. In fact, it smells and tastes like medicine, although not in the contemporary, antiseptic way. No, it tastes like an old apothecary might have smelled, back when they were dispensaries of alcoholic tinctures of laudanum and herbs. Actually, there is a soda based on that old pharmacy smell -- Dr Pepper. I know this because I've been to the Dr Pepper museum in Waco, Texas. I also know a fair amount about old apothecaries, because I used to malinger around the Pharmacy Museum in New Orleans' French Quarter, which also, at the time, housed the Museum of the American Cocktail. The two are closely linked, as many of the alcoholic tinctures used as remedies by early pharmacists eventually went on to become cocktail ingredients, such as Peychaud's bitters. Knowing this puts me in a wonderful mood, as my mother is a pharmacist and my father is a pharmacologist. So, when I mix cocktails and get drunk off them, I feel as though, in my own way, I am continuing the family business.

My latest Galliano experiment is called the Adam's Apple, and is a good, simple recipe:

Fill tall glass with ice cubes
Add 1 1/2 oz Liquore Galliano
Fill with apple juice
Squeeze 1/4 section fresh lime into glass. Drop in lime shell.

Here we have a perfect Galliano cocktail, in the sense that it is a drink that doesn't seek to bury the flavor of the liquor, but to emphasize it. As a result, your enjoyment of this drink is going to be limited to how much you like Galliano, because, man, one sip of this and your mouth is just flooded with the liqueur's spicy botanical flavor. It's a little like eating an apple that has rolled around in a rather fancy flower garden for a few hours.

In fact, the resulting cocktail has a weirdly old-fangled quality to it. It feels like a cocktail from the moive The Wicker Man (the 1973 version), in which a self-righteous police detective investigates a missing child on a small Scottish island that has reverted back to paganism. The climax of the movie is set during the island's harvest festival, and one can imagine wandering through it, surrounded by revelers dressed as hobby horses and Morris dancers, eating bread shaped like humans and offering prayers to older gods. On a wooden table, alongside typical harvest foods of apples and gourds, a large loving cup is full of a strange yellow fluid, filled with fruits and flower petals. You sip from that bowl, and, there it is, the flavor of the Adam's Apple.

More Galliano cocktails.

I'M NOT ONE FOR HYPERBOLE, but James Clarke's 1969 book Man is the Prey is the only compelling reason man was put on this earth, and is the very quintessence of our genius. It is, as you may have guessed from the cover, When Animals Attack in book form, and has one of the best first sentences I have ever read: "This book is written in the belief that people like to know precisely what is eating them."

The book is a reminder that, however civilized we may be, we are never too far from nature's red tooth and claw, and that most of the animals that inhabit nature are amoral killing machines. I mean, what can you really say about the black rhino, who the book informs us has such a bad temper that it will attack speeding trains, and who are so powerful that one managed to run a full mile after it was shot, even though its heart was pulped? I don't know if it is useful to know that chimpanzees will sometimes rush out of the jungle and bite people's ears off, or that one of the most murderous animals on earth is the hippopotamus, who will bite you in two just for getting in its way. But I'll tell you this: The book is a hell of a read.

I discovered Man is the Prey when I was living in Los Angeles in the early 90s, at a used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard that had a section called "oddities"; indeed, you can see that the word "oddities" is written in pencil on the book's first page. All bookstores should have such a section, and, sometimes, I feel my book collection is that section -- I will share additional publications ex libris in this blog. This one I have especially fond memories of, because I used to bring it with me to the Los Angeles zoo and read passages aloud from the book. I remember going to the reptile room and reading the section about the Egyptian cobra, or asp, as an especially sullen asp flicked its tongue at me behind glass. There were several teenager girls behind me, and they listened in as I read of Cleopatra's suicide by the bite of this snake, which, the book assured us, would not have been pleasant. Instead, it would have been "preceded by violent convulsions, copious salivation, and evacuation of the bowels and bladder." Upon hearing this, the girls began to scream.

An instant later, a zookeeper emerged from a hidden door, furious. He informed us that reptiles are nervous creatures and loud noises, such as hysterical screaming, could upset the beasts so badly that they might die. He then invited us to leave. That was the moment when I realized, and not for the last time, that the deadliest creature on earth is the human teenage girl.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

I'M RATHER A FAN of champagne cocktails, or, rather, the Champagne Cocktail, which adds sugar and bitters to a champagne flute. If you don't have a lot of money to buy a really premium champagne, you're often going to end up with a too-sweet California white made to sparkle with an injection of carbon dioxide. There's really only one point to this drink, which is to pour it, in large quantities, into the mouths of brassy and bosomy American women who mistake it for being sophisticated, instantly declare that it makes them light headed, and then fling their brassieres across the room.

But just as many a cocktail has been invented to make rotgut liquors palatable, the Champagne Cocktail will make a better drink out of a poor sparkling wine, especially if you follow the original recipe and add in a teaspoon of brandy.

So I'm inclined to try champagne cocktails, and the Sparkling Galliano, which falls into the "Summertime Coolers" section of my Galliano cocktail guide, seemed like a good bet. It's another simple drink: 1/2 oz Liquore Galliano, 4 oz iced champagne, 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice, and a cucumber rind garnish, served in a champagne goblet.

In fact, it's a disappointment. At least with the Champagne Cocktail, the bitters balance the sweetness, but this drink is nothing but sweet. Additionally, the sparkling wine and the Galliano do not blend, so you have two very different tastes competing for your attention. It wouldn't be a good drink for our brassy date, either, who would declare that it tastes wrong and refuse to drink any more of it, and, there, you've gone and done it with your stupid cocktail. You've ruined both the sparkling wine and the chance for sloppy, drunken romance. And what's left? Conversation? I don't think so, honey.

More Galliano cocktails.

I AM ABOUT TO register an odd complaint. It is as follows: Today's women only seem capable of dancing like a stripper. Now, I know, I know, gentle readers. You are asking yourself, "Hooray!" Now, that might sound like a shout of joy rather than a question, but it implies a question, and that implied question is, "What the hell are you complaining about?"

Well, here is what I am complaining about: Strippers don't know how to dance anymore either. If you watch old Russ Meyer films, such as Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill, the murderous go-go girls of the movie begin in a strip club shimmying madly. They monkey and frug as leering men call out approvingly phrases such as "Go, baby!" and "Work it!", and the girls respond by going and working, and it's all terribly exciting.

Compare that to the modern stripper, who tends to just writhe around with her arms in the air, or crawl around on all fours, or spin around a pole like a ceiling fan. I know some people think these moves just ooze sex, but it's only because we're programed to think so. The Boston Monkey, now that oozes sex. Contemporary stripper dancing just seems like a satire of burlesque, as though a lithe robot had been taught a simplified Little Egypt routine. But at least strippers are unclad when they do it. Regular girls tend to have their clothes on at clubs, and so wind up seeming as though the only way they've ever learned how to dance is by watching the bar dances in Coyote Ugly, and that's just sad.

Not that today's men are any better. Sure, some bore you with the Achy Breaky Heart if you ask and they happen to be wearing a cowboy hat, but most tend to just bob in place, thrusting half-heartedly with their groins while closing their eyes ecstatically. If they have a dance partner, they will either spank her or dry hump her, depending on which way she is facing. As I said, sad.

I will not be that man. Actually, I've never been that man. I was a break dancer in high school, if you can believe it, and can still do a wicked back spin. I took folk dance when I was in college, and later became a dance instructor at Arthur Murray's. So, when called upon to dance, will mambo or swing dance with a ragged approximation of expertise, the dance of someone who learned a dozen steps decades ago and still vaguely remembers them.

But I've always loved the fad dances of the 60s, and so that's what I shall be doing this year. And my first one will be among the most popular ever, The Twist, which is a simple dance. As Chubby Checker, who popularized the dance, explained, you just act like you're stubbing out a cigarette with your toe while you dry off your backside with a towel. Easy.

Here is me doing the twist. Try it at home. It's easiest with your shoes off, as is true of many 60s dances, and I suspect is the reason for the "sock hop," in which dancers shed their shoes in their high school gymnasium. I've been told the real reason was to discourage teenagers from getting too fresh with each other, but that makes no sense. Who tries to discourage sexual experimentation by disrobing? It's like telling kids they shouldn't go to second base, and then insisting they take their shirts off. And then we're right back to stripper dancing.

SO, ONE OF MY Christmas gifts from Eda Cherry was this book, Discover Gold: Recipes for Making Delicious Drinks with Liquore Galliano. I have a bottle of the liquor, which is a mix of some 30-odd ingredients, including vanilla and star anise, which I would say are its most immediately noticeable flavors. I've really only used Galliano to make three drinks. The first is the Harvey Wallbanger, which is a screwdriver with Galliano floated on top, and gets its name from a despondent surfer named Harvey who supposedly imbibed too much of the stuff (one story has it happening at Hollywood's Blackwatch bar) and then proceeded to smack into the bar's walls on his way out.

The second Galliano cocktail I have made is a variation of the Harvey Wallbanger called the Goldfinger, which is made with pineapple juice rather than orange juice. And the third cocktail I have made is a combination of the two other drinks, made with both pineapple and orange juice, that I invented and call the Harvey Fingerbanger.

So it was with great interest that I made my first cocktail from the Discover Gold book, a drink that is impressively named the Golden Sting Ray and is credited to the equally impressively named Marjorie L. Belcher of Dayton, Ohio. It's a simple drink, consisting of 1 oz. Galliano and 1 oz. Bourbon (I used Maker's Mark), shaken with ice and then poured into a cocktail glass.

The resulting drink is delicious. Galliano and bourbon mixes very well, and the cocktail has all the punch of a good bourbon, but coupled with the sweetness and complexity of the Galliano. If you're like me and have only had Galliano in small amounts, as what is called a "perfume" in the mixology business, drinking this much of the liqueur at once is initially a little startling. Galliano has a very strong, distinct flavor, and, if you've just had it as a teaspoon worth of liquid floated on top of a citrus cocktail, you've really only gotten a hint of it. Like most herbal liquors, it is not going to be to everybody's tastes, especially drinkers who don't like sweet cocktails, or the flavor of anise. But the Golden Sting Ray has the feel of a too-smart drink that might have been enjoyed by the 60s sophisticate set, drunk in airport cocktail lounges by men in sharkskin suits with neat pocket squares. Also, as you can tell from the ingredients, the Golden Sting Ray is a cocktail that is essentially two shots of strong liquor, so if you're used to guzzling rum and Coca Cola or 7&7s, watch out. You can get plenty drunk on the Golden Sting Ray plenty fast.

More Galliano cocktails.

I MIGHT NOT have thought of getting a man fur of my own, despite the fact that it is an absolute essential of masculine fashion extravagance. However, on New Year's Eve I headed out to attend the sort of party where porn is played on a jumbo-screen television, reposado tequila is consumed in heroic quantities, and, at three in the morning, you're not absolutely certain whose leg you're stroking. As I headed toward the car, I noticed what looked like a huge bear mauling the apartment's Dumpster.

On closer inspection, it turned out to be this delicious fur coat. I am neither certain that it is a man's coat nor that it is real fur, although it looks to be beaver, or ermine, or mink, or something. Whatever the case, it fits, and looks fabulously extravagant.

It was made by Malden Limited and looks to date back to the 60s; there was a Malden Ltd. at that time that had a patent on faux fur, so it seems likely this is not the hide of any real animal. This does nothing for my conscience, which did not need easing, as even if it were real fur, I found it in the garbage, and so have not supported the fur industry in any way whatsoever. But neither do I care that it is faux fur; that would be a petty concern, appropriate to someone who buys fur as an insufferable act of demonstrating their bourgeoisie status, but beneath me. Also, if its lining (pictured right) is any indication, it was meant for a woman or Lee Liberace, who would have appreciated its regal floral wallpaper pattern. No matter. Fabulousness knows no limitations of gender, so don't be surprised if you see me lurking at the backs of Twin Cities cocktail lounges, a glass of brandy in my hand, sweating and looking faint from the mounds of brown pelt piled atop me.

AS I MENTIONED YESTERDAY, one of my goals for this new year will be to revisit my wardrobe, which I have grown tired of. I sometimes feel like Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine. In one scene, he sees Jonathan Rhys Meyers, playing glam rocker Brian Slade, on television and imagines leaping to his feet and pointing to the screen, shouting "That's me, dad!" to his disapproving father. Not that I want to be glam. Or gay. Or an Irish actor playing a fictionalized David Bowie. Or whatever it was that Christian Bale was responding to. In fact, if I Bale and I share anything in common, it's a desire to be Batman. But I digress.

No, what I like about that scene is that in a dreary, conservative English suburb, at least one fellow sees a dash of outrageousness and immediately responds to it. In fact, later we see him leave his parents' house and quickly switch his regular clothes into something a little more colorful.

I have a history of wearing bowling and Hawaiian shirts, and this fact has become terribly boring to me. Clichés are always boring, and these shirts are the lazy cliché of the white hipster. And so it is time to try something new. I began by querying Ask Metafilter, which gave me a few pointers. But also decided it was time for the return of my sleazy lounge lizard mustache, which I have had, on and off, for about five years. I've tended toward a clean shave for the past few years, but no more.

They call this type of facial foliage a pencil mustache, presumably since it is supposed to look like you have just balanced a pencil on your lip. I suspect that there is another reason: To properly grow one, you must be born with a tight mass of bristly black hair, the sort your associate with thick-necked Eastern Europeans named Kazimir. For those of us who don't need to shave at least once every three hours, there is only one way to get a pencil mustache that looks right, and that is to draw it on with a pencil. This is what I do, and I make no apologies.