Like they used to.

There will be young gossips coming to this site today who’ll take one look at the photos, note it’s Jack Nicholson…and quickly move on. Ugh, they’ll say. Who cares?

And then it’s back to The Hills, the Lauren Conrads, the Brody Jenners, the High School Musicals… the Laurens and the Zac Efrons and so many other tv twats and Hollywood skanks who can barely communicate thought into coherent, grammatically correct sentences and who almost never have anything interesting to say.

This is a time when erudition is grossly underrated.

And so it becomes doubly refreshing, not to mention entertaining, when a star can not only string two words together but use them to craft an argument so eloquently especially on an extremely titillating subject you find yourself agreeing even if you don’t agree.

Jack spoke to both Parade Magazine and the Times Online. The interviews are MUST READS – the man does not shy away from expression. And as a result, I can now understand. I can understand why women would want a piece. He might be old and flabby but his brain is sharp as sex. I totally would.

Click here and here for the full articles and below for highlights. And yes, Posh styled him for Parade.

On sex without consequence and the new power of propriety:
I’m not the kind of social gadabout I used to be, that’s for sure. I’ve got young children now. It’s limiting. You can’t get too wild these days, but I’m as wild as you can get. There could be 9,000, for all I know. I used to live so freely! The mantra for my generation was ‘Be your own man!’ I always said: ‘Hey, you can have whatever rules you want, I’m going to have mine. I’ll accept the guilt. I’ll pay the cheque. I’ll do the time.’ I chose my own way. That was my philosophical position well into my fifties. As I’ve gotten older, the only thing that’s happened is I can’t solve everything. I always thought I could. I’m too old now. I had to adjust.

“In my lifetime, from World War II on life got freer and freer until herpes, then Aids. That was the end – ask any bar owner. “Things moved to the right. Once this idea that you can die from sex got into people’s heads, it became a weapon in the hands of stiff, erect, martinet father/parent fascists to repress sensuality. When you start doing that, society gets rigid, and social life as I knew it was over, fast. I loved that era, and it’s gone. Everything is about infections now. Anybody under 30 has never known the freedom I knew. They’re frightened. They have no idea about alternative lifestyles. Freedom’s never been part of the air they breathe. Naturally, I reacted differently to this fear of freedom, because it’s a fear of feeling. I’m not talking about being profligate with sex and drugs. Fear of freedom is a withholding of love, and it’s unyielding.”

On Irish Catholicism:
“I had to haltingly investigate Catholicism by myself,” he informs me, “because nobody asked me to go to church. I was the oldest kid in my first-communion classes. In my opinion, if you’re going to be theocratic, Catholicism is the most intelligent belief system. My immediate family were failed Irish Catholics.”

"My family were tough-minded people who didn"t go much for what they called the "shanty Irish" or professional Irish. But they were Irish, and it manifested itself from an early age. I could always express my opinion, like everybody else, and things got talked about. I wasn"t inhibited by anything."

On the female species and gland control:
"These issues between men and women are not psychological. Look, remember what a gland is. Most of these are glandular issues. A gland is what allows that mother to lift that truck off a child. Whatever intelligent design is, it"s not going to leave the continuation of the human species up to fashion-crazy, flitting mentalities. It"s in those glands."

"The infatuation cycle of 18 months hasn"t changed a lot since the monkeys. Look at the numbers. Eighteen months is nine months doubled. A woman"s entire system is set so that when you"re having that procreative act with a woman, you"re dealing with a being whose actual cycle is nine months. It doesn"t have to do with her brain. It has to do with her entire bodily system, which is there to overcome the brain. We don"t legislate this stuff. We don"t out-think it. You cannot change these fundamental things that we are as human beings--but you can adjust to it."