The world at large remembers the Porky’s movies, if it remembers them at all, as the precursors of the American Pie films, a way station between Animal House and the most recent crop of movies that encourage us to laugh at young people and their genitals. The more savvy film…

For the average person, “spoken word” is not a good thing. It evokes images of people with mikes, flannel shirts, strident voices and issues with their parents (or parent-substitute, the government). No thanks. Spoken word was pitched as a trend, hyped as poetry-meets-rock-and-roll. Suddenly, every coffeehouse had an open-mike night,…