Queen sacrifice at Renaissance High: Catherine de’ Medici, Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots ‘Reign’

October 12, 2015

One of the guiltier guilty pleasures of TV, along with the evolution of Don Johnson’s hair on “Miami Vice” reruns – Has there ever been a more beautiful man and more shades of blond? – is The CW’s “Reign,” the story of Mary, Queen of Scots played out as if an American high school were staging a Renaissance drama. There’s lots of mean girls and good-bad girls bemoaning manipulative guys whom they would seek to manipulate in turn. Everyone talks about “cahstles” and “Frahnce” in plummy Brit accents that are phonier than $3 bills – even though the series is set mostly in France and Catherine de’ Medici, Mary’s ever-hating mother-in-law, was Italian. ...

Parting thoughts on the US Open

September 15, 2015

In the end, I think Stan Wawrinka did Novak Djokovic a favor. By beating Nole in the French Open final, he took the Grand Slam pressure off of him and enabled him to say, “You know what? The heck with it. I’m slamming that door (pun intended) and going for it at Wimbledon and the US Open.”

All the talk was about Serena, but Nole actually came closer to winning the Grand Slam as he lost in the French final but won the other three (US Open, Wimbledon, Australian Open) whereas she won the French, Australian and Wimbledon but lost in the US semifinals. ...

Rafa – Tommy Hilfiger’s Nacho Figueras?

August 26, 2015

Rafael Nadal is a fever in a woman’s blood.

The sensual gaze. The tawny, molded muscles. The playful sexiness that makes a little skin oh so in.

He’s displayed all that and more in the Armani jeans and underwear campaign and now he takes it off again as the spokesmodel for a new line of Tommy Hilfiger underwear and clothes as well as the new Hilfiger fragrance TH Bold. ...

Borna and Nole – in Vogue

August 23, 2015

Well, once again the gazillion-page (actually only 832-page) September Vogue is out, and, once again, the big issue for me is not the cover or the fashion but whom editrix Anna Wintour has anointed among male tennis players for the ritual dressing (and undressing).

This year, tennis-crazed Anna, the sly minx, is offering a kind of two-for-one and her own version of doubles. In the “People Are Talking About” section, rising star and teen dream Borna “Identity” Ćorić looks like he’s headed off to Harvard, standing at the net in a gray and white Canali sweater with gray J. Crew sweats. Coach Brad Gilbert has given the 18-year-old Croat the nickname but the question is, “Whose identity?” ...

Sail away, sail away, sail away – ‘The Stylish Life: Yachting”

July 7, 2015

In my debut novel “Water Music,” the four gay athletes at its core explore their relationships during a vacation on Mykonos, the home of tennis player Alex Vyranos.

Alex is the son of a man who has made a fortune working for an Onassis-style shipping tycoon. At one point, Spyros Vyranos lends his son a company yacht, the Semiramide, to pilot his three friends to the neighboring isle of Delos, birthplace of Apollo. Spyros has warned Alex that the Semiramide is not a toy. He doesn’t want him drinking and sailing He doesn’t want the four winding up on TMZ.

Of course not, papa, Alex remembers telling him as he takes a swig of Dom Perignon at the wheel of the Semiramide, feeling all the power, freedom and escape that a yacht has to offer. ...

Clarence Thomas and the mind as its own place

June 27, 2015

As the Supremes were busy upholding gay marriage barely (5-4, still a win is a win) the dissenters among them went into overdrive with talk of the Aztecs, hippies and California not being part of the American West.

But leave it to Justice Clarence “Uncle” Thomas – a man who once dismissed a racial discrimination suit by noting that most of the players in the NBA are black – to come up with a point that really misses the point. ...

Tennis, everyone

June 26, 2015

Just in time for Wimbledon (June 29 through July 12), teNeues offers “The Stylish Life: Tennis,” a new coffee table book that ranges over the art, fashion and personalities of the modern game that began in the late 19th century. It’s a book that had me at the back cover.

The photograph (also reproduced opposite the Table of Contents) depicts the green tennis courts of Italy’s Il San Pietro di Positano resort spilling onto the jagged, pristine blue Amalfi Coast. That photograph and the reproduction of a Roger Broders poster circa 1930, with its clay courts tumbling onto a periwinkle Mediterranean Sea in Monte Carlo, are precisely what I imagined in “Water Music,” my debut novel, when my athlete-heroes vacation on the island of Mykonos. ...