Escaping for a day to Greenwich Polo

June 27, 2017

Two of the best Sunday afternoons I’ve spent recently found me taking a break from blogging and novel-writing to relish show jumping at Old Salem Farm in North Salem, N.Y. and polo at Connecticut’s Greenwich Polo Club. Both sports figure in the third planned novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” a tale of blood and bloodlines about rival horse families told in part from the viewpoint of a racehorse trying to become the first since Whirlaway to win the Triple Crown and the Travers at Saratoga. ...

Monuments to misunderstanding: The Confederacy, context and ‘winning’

May 23, 2017

The recent removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans – which has hit a raw nerve in the South – says as much about our misconceptions about memorials and winning and losing as it does about racism’s bitter stranglehold on America.

Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, who appeared on PBS with historian Walter Isaacson to discuss what many blacks perceive to be symbols of lingering racism and some whites see as emblems of political correctness – is right to say that memorials are meant to honor their subjects. They do so not only in the display of what is often great art but in pride of place. ...

No bull: ‘Fearless Girl’s’ ancient Greek evocation

April 17, 2017

The controversy over the faceoff between “Fearless Girl” and “Charging Bull” on Wall Street has raised all sorts of psychosexual and political implications.

Some have seen the 4-foot-girl – hands on hips, chest puffed like a sail heading into the wind – as a symbol of feminist ideals. Apparently, that’s what sponsor State Street Global Advisors, which wants to encourage more women in the boardroom, had in mind. ...

Resurrection

April 16, 2017

As Lent ends and the Easter season begins today with Christians celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, TV has once again presented its share of documentaries and films about Jesus’ Passion.

PBS’ “Last Days of Jesus” offers a detailed consideration of what it meant to die by crucifixion. I now no longer watch such scenes, just as I no longer watch horror movies. “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” as President Bill Clinton put it at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, prefer to dwell on happier circumstances. Not that we eschew suffering. Indeed, the surest way to prolong suffering is the refusal to endure it. It’s just that we no longer feel the need to go out of our way to create or endure needless suffering. ...

The Onassis Center’s ‘World of Emotion’

April 12, 2017

It is perhaps no small irony that the culture that gave us “nothing in excess; everything in moderation” also gave us a literary masterpiece whose first word is “rage.”

The ancient Greeks were a mass of contradictions. But then, human nature is a mass of contradictions and the Greeks were nothing if not masters of plumbing the human condition as seen in “A World of Emotions, Ancient Greece, 700 B.C.-200 A.D.,” on view at the Onassis Cultural Center New York through June 24. ...

Whose art is it anyway?

April 3, 2017

The painting shows a young black man in a coffin, his face a blur of color in the manner of Abstract Expressionist art – and violent death.

The departed, then, is not just someone who has succumbed to the ills that the flesh is heir to. Emmett Till was just 14 years old when he was lynched by two white men for flirting with the wife of one of them. “Open Casket, “ on view at the Whitney Biennial, is Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting of a mutilated Till in the open casket his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on. The work has drawn protests and condemnation from black artists and writers, who question the right of a white woman to appropriate a searing moment in black history. ...

Beauty in the ‘Beast’

March 29, 2017

A shoutout to the new film version of “Beauty and the Beast,” which proves you can build on previous iterations and make something that is related but individual.

Of the three Walt Disney versions using Alan Menken’s score – which also include an acclaimed animated movie and a Broadway musical – this latest interpretation is by far the most adult (although kids will still enjoy it). ...