Booby Prize

K.C. Bailey

Howard’s End: Schlock shock-jock Howard Stern surprises even himself.

Author Marilyn Yalom is exposed to Howard Stern’s ‘Private Parts’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies. This week, he takes noted historian Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Breast, to see Howard Stern’s Private Parts.

MARILYN YALOM, before I invited her to see the autobiographical comedy Private Parts, had never heard of the film’s subject and star: radio shock-jock Howard Stern. Many would say Yalom is a very lucky woman.

After all, Stern’s gleefully puerile on-air antics–for which he has paid over $1 million in fines to the FCC–have won him at least twice as many enemies as dedicated, worshipful fans. His consistent remarks on lesbianism and on the size of his own penis, and his unrelenting obsession with well-endowed centerfold models have earned him the labels of “sexist pig,” “immoral pervert,” and even “the anti-Christ.”

“My son couldn’t believe I was coming to see this,” Yalom confides, as we take our seats at a Private Parts pre-screening. “He’s certain that I will despise Howard Stern.”

Yalom is a renowned feminist author and lecturer, currently a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous scholarly works, including her exhaustively researched new book, A History of the Breast (Knopf, 1997). Beginning with the question “Who owns the breast?,” Yalom’s History explores 2,500 years of art, literature, and public policy, proposing that the meaning and image of women’s breasts were long ago appropriated for the religious, political, and commercial uses of men. Which leads us to Howard Stern.

“I thought there was one funny moment, at the beginning, when he sees this woman at the airport and undresses her in his mind,” Yalom recalls, sipping tea after the film. “Suddenly we see her breasts begin to grow in his presence. That said it all! They didn’t really have to have all these other women coming in later with their overly large breasts, as if that were the only kind of breasts there are.

“We don’t see the range of bodies here, we don’t see the range of breasts. Now, can I ask that of Howard Stern, and from this kind of movie?” Yalom pauses a moment, thinking it through. “Probably not,” she shrugs.

One scene in the film shows Stern performing a censor-bashing game during his radio show in which characters are asked to supply words that might fill the blanks in the phrases “blank willow” and “blank a-doodle-doo.”

“That was rather amusing,” laughs Yalom. “He was playing with our fear of words, and those words do make people uncomfortable. I think words can have enormous power. They can hobble us. I can remember, certainly, as a child, seeing words that someone had inscribed on the cement. It was as if they could jump off the cement and strike me, or kill me, if I was to pronounce them.”

Yalom proposes, however, that Stern’s desire to be outrageous flounders in his non-creative use of big-bosomed nudity.

“The film showed women totally stripped, but you didn’t see any men,” she says. “You certainly didn’t see him totally stripped. He talks about his own penis a lot, but he never shows it.” Ah, but there was the notorious Fartman sequence in which Stern dresses as a superhero with a derrière-exposing outfit.

“So you got little bits of his buttocks,” she counters, waving the thought away. “If he wanted to show his ass he should have done so.

“There are three women who have been appearing at my bookstore readings,” she goes on. “They show up and they take off their shirts, and sit in a row during the reading. And there they are, with breasts of various sizes. They are, of course, making a statement by uncovering their chests, and frankly, I think that is a little more interesting than seeing only the standardized, male-fantasy boobs in this film.

“But how do we get our ideas about the ideal body in the first place?” she asks. “We get them by seeing only one kind of form.

“If we lived in the Middle Ages, the ideal body would have small breasts. You see that in the painting and the poetry of the time. There was a very different ideal of the perfect body. Then we got the ideal of the hourglass figure around the year 1900, and then a boyish body in the 1920s.

“The kind of body Howard Stern obsesses over–which came to be the ideal in the 1950s–is an impossible body for most women. It’s thin thighs, thin hips, a thin waist, and these enormous boobs. It shouldn’t surprise us that liposuction and breast enlargements are among the most common cosmetic surgeries performed in this country.”

In spite of this movie’s depiction of Stern’s radio program as a kind of adolescent freak show, Yalom admits that it did make him appear–occasionally–somewhat endearing. Almost.

“To tell you the truth,” she smiles, “he really wasn’t as much of a freak as I thought he was going to be.”

From the March 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Mob Instinct

Good Fellas: Johnny Depp and Al Pacino swear by the Mob.

Reinhold Aman on the slang-filled gangster flick ‘Donnie Brasco’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate post-film conversation. This time out, he takes Dr. Reinhold Aman, notorious linguist and publisher (Maledicta), to see Donnie Brasco.

I DON’T GO to the movies often,” admits Dr. Reinhold Aman, Ph.D., just moments after seeing Donnie Brasco, a fascinating new gangster epic set in the Italian neighborhoods of New York. We’ve invaded a nearby restaurant to discuss the film, but first my guest wants me to know the monumental nature of this occasion.

“Do you know when I was last in a movie theater?” he asks. “Do you know how long it’s been?” He let’s the question dangle there, until he finally names the date.

It was 1987. The movie was Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

He’s right: I’m shocked.

Then again, my guest has been pretty busy. Not only does the Bavarian-born professor operate a thriving, 20-year-old, one-man publishing empire, but there is also that notorious, semi-annual act of intellectual anarchy known as Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression, a scholarly collection of dirty insults and curses.

There was also that federal prison stint a few years back, after Aman was convicted for distributing insulting pamphlets about a divorce judge in Wisconsin (yes, it’s a crime). And then there is his recent book, Hillary Clinton’s Pen Pal: A Guide to Life and Lingo in Federal Prison (Maledicta, 1996), which he has been busily promoting.

I suppose, on reflection, that all of that could keep anyone out of a theater.

“The truth is, I don’t like most movies,” Aman confesses. The only reason he went to see that particular film 10 years ago was that Kubrick–a longtime admirer of Aman’s work–peppered his script with juicy lines borrowed from the pages of a Maledicta.

An example: In one memorable scene of that Vietnam-based film, a man tries to sell his prostitute sister to a group of GIs, promising, “She’s so good she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.”

“That was one of mine,” Aman shrugs, smiling. “When I heard that up on the screen, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Unfortunately, the movie was virtually blackballed in this country. Its vulgarity was too honest and realistic.”

And speaking of realistic vulgarity, Donnie Brasco is a veritable primer of raw, underworld slang; its ’70s-era gangsters all spout a testosterone-fueled stream of obscenities, street talk, and Mafia lingo that come off like a secret code made up by young bullies. Based on a true story, Donnie is about an FBI Agent (Johnny Depp) who infiltrates the New York Mafia by befriending a used-up hit man named Lefty (the brilliant Al Pacino). A gripping and intelligent exploration of an unlikely alliance between two men, Brasco is set in a world where words can be as deadly as weapons.

“There is a glossary of Mob Speak on the Maledicta Web page,” Aman says of his well-maintained site.

“In Donnie Brasco,” he continues, “the use of vulgarity was pretty good. They said ‘fuck’ just enough to be realistic without going overboard. But I think that they, being Italian, growing up in Italian-speaking families, would have used a lot more blasphemy. They would say, ‘Hostia Madonna,’ or they’d use the name of Christ or Mary. And they would use more authentic Italian obscenities, like ‘Tu cazzo!’ That means, ‘You prick!’ It’s very common.”

“I like the word whacking,” he muses. “You and me, we’d say ‘kill’ or ‘wipe out,’ but ‘whacking’! Whacking is when you slap somebody. So they really intensify the meaning of their actions by using a relatively harmless word to describe it.”

Going on to describe a number of his “acquaintances” from the federal penitentiary, Aman continues. “One was a typical Brooklyn Mafioso. He just said ‘fuck’ a lot. Fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that. Cursing everyone, cursing his fate! He was always a decent guy to me. He always saved his crossword puzzle for me.

“There was another guy who hated me, but he gave me one of the best quotes in my book. It was my first or second night in prison. I said something insignificant, I forget what. This guy next to me was a 75-year-old lifetime Mafioso, and he thought I was talking about him.

“So he screamed at me, ‘I’m gonna fuck a hole in your head!’ And I was too sassy. I didn’t know yet how dangerous prison is. So I said, ‘Oh yeah? You? With your shriveled-up little dick?’

“He was stunned for a moment by this incredible sassiness from a young punk. Then he said, ‘Well then, I’m gonna have somebody else fuck a hole in your head!'” Aman chuckles at the thought. ” I could have been killed. I should never have done that.”

Perhaps not. But it is a great quote.

From the March 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.