Whenever I was asked about my “walls of inspiration” – which have followed me to each new job, albeit with a changing cast of characters – I always responded that they were a feminist gesture, that I would remove them the day Playboy magazine folded.
Well, Hell has frozen over and I’ll have to remove my men. (Yeah, right. More on that in a bit.) ...
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Goodness, 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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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. ...
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Kudos to Novak Djokovic, Aaron Rodgers and American Pharoah, all among the nominees for ESPYS (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly).
AP got the nod in the Best Championship Performance category, along with San Francisco Giants’ ace (and World Series star) Madison Bumgarner, Florida Softball’s Lauren Haeger and LeBron James. No word yet on whether the Pharoah will attend, although his jockey and fellow nominee Victor Espinoza will no doubt be there.
Nole got two noms – Best International Athlete along with Formula One’s Lewis Hamilton, the LPGA’s Lydia Ko and soccer’s Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo; and Best Male Tennis Player, along with Roger Federer, Stan Wawrinka and Marin Cilic. Aaron was also a double nominees as Best NFL Player (along with Tom Brady, Antonio Brown, DeMarco Murray and JJ Watt) and Best Male Athlete, with Watt again, James and Stephen Curry. ...
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So NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will hear Tom Brady’s appeal, despite a request from the NFL Players Association that he recuse himself.
“One of the primary responsibilities of the commissioner is to protect the integrity of the game and to do what’s right for the game of football,” Goodell said.
“That’s my job. We have a process that’s been negotiated with the union that’s been in place for decades. It’s something that we’ve had in place for a long time and we’re going to do it that way.”
What planet is he on? First, there’s the NFL’s constant misuse of the word “integrity.” It means “wholeness.” In Jungian psychology, the integrated self is the self that is all of a piece. Alistair Cooke, the late, longtime host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” once said of Marilyn Monroe that she was a person of integrity – a mess off and onscreen. Cruel but you get his point: “Integrity” doesn’t mean “honesty.” It means that you’d be the same way with the president of the United States that you are with your grocer. It’s a quality that the Dalai Lama and the pope are said to have. It’s not a quality that’s usually associated with football players. What a surprise. ...
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One of the nuggets I gleaned from attending the Algonkian Writers’ Conference last December in Manhattan was that when it comes to historical romance, it’s the Tudors or bust.
It figures. Working backward, there was Elizabeth I, England’s greatest ruler; her sister, the pathetic, misguided “Bloody Mary”; their baby bro, Edward VI; and, of course, the daddy from Hell, Henry VIII, with those – count ’em – six wives. No dramatist could conjure such symmetrical marital disaster – Catherine of Aragon, annulled; Anne Boleyn, beheaded; Jane Seymour, dead in childbirth; Anne of Cleves, annulled; Katherine Howard, beheaded; and Catherine Parr, survived Henry, but wait, would remarry and, you guessed it, wind up dead in childbirth.
Historian David Starkey (“Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII”) once told me that of the half-dozen, Catherine of Aragon was the only one Henry ever really loved. But his quest for a son, for proof of his manhood and for liberation from papal Rome and the memory of his older brother, Arthur, who had been Catherine’s husband, drove him into the arms of the bewitching Anne Boleyn, linchpin of the six wives’ psychodrama. Did he use Anne to gain control of the Church in England or was he, as Starkey said, so in love with her that he was willing to renounce his role as Defender of the (Roman Catholic) Faith? Perhaps a bit of both?
Anne’s rise and fall is told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell – the blacksmith’s son-turned-chancellor – in Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” (She’s at work on the last book in the trilogy.) Naturally, PBS’ “Masterpiece” couldn’t resist. “Wolf Hall” (April 5 through May 10) dramatizes the first two books, with British theater star Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis (“Homeland”) as Henry and Claire Foy (“Little Dorrit”) as Anne. “Wolf Hall” – the title refers to rival Jane Seymour’s familial estate but suggests the den of wolves the Tudors were – is a daring conceit. For what makes men like Cromwell effective, their ability to manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes, is what can make them potentially boring front and center. (Imagine the story of Bill and Hillary Clinton told from the viewpoint of their accountant.) The beauty of the books and the miniseries is that we enter Cromwell’s mind to meet a man weary of and disgusted by the power games men play but unable to relinquish them. ...
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Still checking out the newly redesigned New York Times Magazine – so far, so good. But I was excited to see a page on “shipping” in the column Search Results by Jenna Wortham. And no, it wasn’t a column about Fed Ex.
Shipping is about relationshipping, or a romance between characters who are not otherwise romantically linked, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson on PBS’ “Sherlock.” (Drawings of them from the Tumblr website are featured on the Search Results page.)
Shipping, then, is the umbrella term for things like slash – gay pairings of characters who were not originally gay – and slash in turn includes male/male romance, which is where I come in. Though the characters in my series “The Games Men Play” – the swimmers and tennis players in “Water Music” and the football players in the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – are entirely fictional, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t influenced by male/male romances I read on the Internet that either used real people (called RPF or real person fiction) or well-known fictional characters. ...
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