At Christmastide, I like to share one of my traditions, which is a reading of a selection from John Milton’s “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” As a classical Christian – I know, an oxymoron – I’m always struck by how the advent of Christianity sounded a death knell for Greco-Roman culture. But then, someone’s sunrise is always someone else’s sunset.
Yet Greco-Roman culture – with its sensual tales of gods and heroes, its dramas on the terrible wonder of the human condition, its emphasis on the body in all its brutal beauty – never died. (It’s a theme of Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel “Julian,” about the post-Christian Roman emperor who attempted to reinstall the Greco-Roman pantheon.) The Greeks would instead resurface in the Renaissance and at the turn of the 19th century. ...
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Read MoreThe acclaimed new movie “The Danish Girl” – about the artist Einar Wegener, who became the first person to have male-to-female sex reassignment surgery – raises intriguing questions about the nature of art.
Specifically, should a transgender role be played by a transgender actor? (The film stars Eddie Redmayne, who won an Oscar for his performance as Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” and has been nominated once again for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award for “Girl.”) More broadly, should creative and interpretive artists stick to their own experiences? The latter is a question that I have a vested interest in as the author of the debut novel “Water Music,” about four gay athletes and how their professional rivalries color their personal relationships with one another, and the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity, success, acceptance and love in the NFL. (They’re both part of my series “The Games Men Play.”)
What, I’m often asked, would a woman – and a straight one at that – know about gay sex? ...
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Read MoreFirst it was Playboy doing away with nude pinups. Now the 2016 Pirelli calendar has eschewed the naked ladies – well, mostly – for something different, courtesy of photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Think Patti Smith as imagined by John Singer Sargent, Fran Lebowitz as a latter-day Georges Sand and model Natalia Vodianova with her youngest in a pose that despite her bare leggy-ness echoes a Raphael Madonna and Child.
Besides Vodianova, other examples of fleshiness are a topless Serena Williams, back to the camera in a heroic lunge; and Amy Schumer in panties and heels, comfortable with her stomach rolls as she holds a paper cup. ...
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Read MoreIf you’re a reader of this blog, then you know that one of its motifs – which also occurs in my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding” – is what I call “the literature of rejection,” that is the disproportionate rage at rejection found among certain antiheroes in literature and among assassins, mass murderers and terrorists.
I was reminded of this – or rather, my sharp-as-a-tack blog administrator reminded me of it – in reading an interview with Arie Kruglanski, co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), founded in 2005 at the University of Maryland with funds from the Department of Homeland Security.
Kruglanski has walked the walk. He was born in Nazi-occupied Poland and spent 15 years teaching psychology at Tel Aviv University. In this interview he echoes 19th-century psychologist-philosopher William James’ view of heroism as a primary spur in human nature, even unto, and perhaps especially if it means, death itself. ...
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Read MoreThere is a moment in “Casablanca” in which Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) – having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp – confronts a group of German officers in Rick’s Café Américain through music. The Germans are loudly, arrogantly singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” an anthem that has its roots in French-German antagonism, when Victor orders the house band to strike up “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, to which club owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) acquiesces. One by one the club patrons rise and join in, all but Victor’s wife – and Rick’s former lover – Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). As the others sing lustily, she sits thinking and marveling at all that has been lost and yet still remains.
It is one of the most moving moments in the history of cinema, one I couldn’t help but flashing on as the City of Light was plunged into the heart of darkness. The fans leaving the Stade de France – where one in a series of coordinated ISIS attacks took place on Friday the 13th – burst into “La Marseillaise.” The exchange students in Manhattan’s Union Square held hands as they sang it that night. And Placido Domingo led The Metropolitan Opera Chorus in it at Lincoln Center Saturday afternoon. It, too, is a symbol of all that has been lost and yet still remains. ...
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Read MoreWhen he’s not busy training for the Breeders’ Cup, which takes place Oct. 31 at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky., American Pharoah has quite the artistic side.
He is among those champions, including Kentucky Derby rival Firing Line and the legendary Cigar, who have done artwork – cleverly called Moneighs – to support After the Finish Line and ReRun Thoroughbred Adoption, which help less fortunate retired racehorses to a new life.
In my guise as editor of WAG magazine, an award-winning lifestyle publication, I had the pleasure of interviewing After the Finish Line President Dawn Mellen, who assists artistes like the Pharoah. ...
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Read MoreGoodness, I don’t know how much longer I, an Elizabeth I fan, can hang with “Reign.”
This season, The CW series about Mary, Queen of Scots has introduced another nemesis apart from her ever-hating mother-in-law, Catherind de’ Medici – Elizabeth I of England.
But portraying Elizabeth as a mean girl is so limiting – particularly when the truth is more delicious than the fiction. ...
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