Larry Flynt

Even though I was in -- or at least alive during -- the sexua revolution, I missed the battles, overlooked the grand strategy, never picked a side, and am not sure to this day what replaced what, and whether it was an improvement. And it wasn't because I had taken the veil or was working in Siberia. Not long after the Summer of Love, 1967, I was a student in Cambridge, Mass., as eager as anyone to be liberated from male domination, religious cant and political apathy. But, even with 30 years' distance and the advantage of the rear view mirror (in which objects may appear larger than they appear)

Imus now believes he caused Clintons inappropriate painFinally, somebody feels President Clinton's pain. Of course, he caused it in the first place.At last year's Radio-Television Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington, radio personality Don Imus joked about the president's alleged extramarital affairs and Hillary Clinton's alleged financial peccadilloes. The Clintons were sitting just a few feet away.Now, Imus says in the June issue of George magazine: "It wasn't whether it was funny or not; it was whether it was appropriate.

THAT THE RIGHT to free speech has acquired something of a cult status is evident in the deification of the pornographer, Larry Flynt, in the much ballyhooed movie, "The People vs. Larry Flynt."The would-be hero is the publisher of Hustler magazine, who has struck it rich by bringing his audiences such breakthroughs in free expression as a cover photo of a naked woman being fed through a meat grinder and bootlegged photos of Jacqueline Kennedy sunbathing in the nude. The movie's champions are apparently nostalgic for the old days, when unorthodox political speech could land people in prison or result in their deportation - as was the case when the socialist Eugene Debs and the anarchist Emma Goldman publicly spoke out against World War I. They are tripping over themselves to praise Flynt.

Anyone who watched the Golden Globes Sunday couldn't miss the countless camera pans of an ever-smiling new actress with a polite blond hairdo and rubbery Hollywood lips. Her name is Courtney Love, and, just in time to survive the media's Death of Grunge pronouncements, she is riding a massive career make-over, suddenly a distant cousin to the reckless bigmouth known for her blood-red lipstick and sloppy kinder-whore stylings. She's become Blanche to her former Baby Jane.Is Love's transformation from addict-widow to movie star the decade's greatest story of triumph?

According to the movies, Eva Peron was noble, Larry Flynt was a hero and Snow White married the prince.The idea is to turn city schools over to private groups before the state gets them.Trashing House of Representatives ethics, $300,000; kicking a TV cameraman in the groin, $200,000. For a price, live your fantasy.Since we won't get a minor-league arena in south Baltimore County, how about a major-league arena in Baltimore City?Pub Date: 1/24/97

BOSTON -- I have long regarded Larry Flynt as the curse of the First Amendment. He's the catch that comes with the freedom of speech. The asterisk on the Constitution.The right to publish a cartoon about Bill Clinton and Paula Jones on the editorial page comes with the curse of a sexual satire in Hustler about Jerry Falwell and his mother. The right to an unauthorized wedding photo of JFK Jr. and his bride comes with the curse of a photo of Jackie O in the buff.You want the freedom to say whatever you want?

In the late '70s, Toby Orenstein recalls, she gave a local child a small role in a production of "Annie Get Your Gun."Orenstein, active in Howard County dramatics since Columbia's founding in the early '70s, recollects that the child knit up his face in concentration and then asked a question that has haunted her on down the years. She had heard it from no child before or since."What," asked the 8-year-old Edward Norton, "is my objective in this scene?""He was amazing," she remembers, delightedly.

RETURNING from a preview of "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" last week, I stopped by a convenience store and picked up a copy of Hustler magazine, Flynt's flagship publication and perhaps the raunchiest skin rag in America. I wanted to make sure whatever I said about Flynt and the movie about him bore some relation to the reality at the newsstand. For this I was punished severely.The other patrons gave me a wide berth as I walked to the checkout counter.A couple in front of me took snide delight in prolonging what seemed an interminable transaction involving a Lotto ticket and a carton of milk.

The oddest of odd couples sits down for a chat with Larry King tonight."Mad About You" (6: 30 p.m.-7 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45) -- Paul invests in a virtual reality system after trying it out and getting a back rub from Christie Brinkley. Hard to believe, but this doesn't sit real well with Jamie. A classic."State Circle" (7: 30 p.m.-8 p.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) -- Just as the swallows return to San Capistrano every year, so, too, do the Maryland legislators return to Annapolis which means it's time for the return of this weekly round-up of things political.

Larry Flynt is the primordial man you hate to love, and the case for his canonization is pretty tricky, if a case at all. The best thing about "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" is that nobody bothers to make it very hard.The movie is instead a bright purple polyester celebration of the oozing vulgarity, the corpulent greed, the sick, out-of-control ego of that infected bedsore on the butt of the body politick that is Flynt himself, founder of Hustler magazine and its wall-to-wall, full-color gyno-vision school of publishing.