Blog

Goodbye, Bruce. Hello, Caitlyn

June 1, 2015

And Godspeed. Reaction to Bruce Jenner’s metamorphosis into Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair has been predictably all over the place and, just as predictably, says more about the commenters than it does about Caitlyn.

There’s no point in dwelling on those who think she’s sick or out for publicity. They just don’t get it.

More interesting are those comments that criticize the pinup aspect of the Annie Leibovitz cover. Let’s face it, if you’re going to transform yourself physically into the sex you believe you always were, well, then you and we want to see that transformation. As for the poster on The New York Times’ site who said that the way to be a smokin’-hot woman at 60 is to live the previous 59 years as a man, well, he – I’m sure it was a he – has a point. I’ve often said on this blog and elsewhere that men are the more beautiful, sexier and thrilling of the two traditional sexes. It’s part of the reason I write about beautiful, sexy, thrilling men in my novel series “The Games Men Play.” ...

Tom Brady and Alex Rodriguez: Statistics and probability

May 9, 2015

Is it merely coincidental that Gisele Bündchen skipped The Metropolitan Museum of Art gala precisely at the moment when hubby Tom Brady was about to be raked over the coals for his role in Deflategate?

What is it that they said in the Deflategate report? It’s “more probable than not” that it was a coincidence. Still, she and he have been staples on the gala’s red carpet for years. Let’s just say it was convenient that she had to attend that Chanel Cruise Seoul event half a world away.

Gala empress Anna Wintour filled in the football slot with Green Bay Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers – who is not in trouble for overinflating his balls, to the chagrin of some – and his girlfriend, actress Olivia Munn, whose J. Mendel gown overwhelmed with its sleeves. (The gala’s fashion proved that less really is more. The more straightforward the gown, as in Gong Li’s black lace and marsala velvet evocation of the gala’s Chinese theme, the more stunning it was.) ...

The transgendered nature of art

April 30, 2015

Bruce Jenner’s transition to womanhood and the profile of transgendered model Andreja Pejić in May Vogue have got me thinking about the transgendered nature of art.

Consider Thomas Hardy – whose “Far From the Madding Crowd” has been made into a new film starring Carey Mulligan, the sensual Matthias Schoenaerts and the estimable Michael Sheen. For him to create some of fiction’s greatest romantic heroines, and heroes, he had to understand a woman’s mind and heart as well as that of a man. For George Balanchine to create some of ballet’s finest works, he had to know a woman’s body as intimately as a man’s.

Art has also long been preoccupied with hermaphroditism – the condition of having the physical attributes of both sexes. In ancient Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus – son of Hermes, the messenger god, and Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty – was a beautiful youth beloved by the water nymph Salmacis, who embraced him against his will in her pool and prayed that the two would become one. ...

To ‘Sir,’ with love

April 12, 2015

A big shout-out to opera star Renée Fleming, a woman after my heart.

In The New York Times’ T magazine column “Take Two,” which juxtaposes comments from unlikely duos on unusual products, she has this to say about “Sir” (Taschen, 700 smackeroos), photographer Mario Testino’s ode to men:

“I had a lot of fun looking at this. It has more six-packs than a 7-Eleven. I like that men are now being scrutinized in the way that women have been for so long.”

Her mighty opposite here – Arnold Schwarzenegger, who knows a thing or two about sculpted male bodies – added: “What I discovered in here was an extraordinary celebration of men. It’s the ideal Christmas present. If I’d spend $700 on a pair of shoes, why not on a book?”

Why indeed? Certainly, Mr. Darcy himself, Colin Firth – one of the subjects, along with George Clooney, Jude Law, Mick Jagger, Keith Richard and others – would alone be worth the price of the book. ...

After Eden: The Met’s resurrection of Adam

March 29, 2015

For years, he graced The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Velez Blanco Patio, just off the Great Hall – a paean to the kind of youthful male beauty that stretches back to the Archaic Greeks. But all of that came to a crashing halt on the evening of Oct. 6, 2002 when Adam, a 15th-century funerary marble by Tullio Lombardo, fell off his pedestal and smashed into 28 pieces.

It turns out that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could put Adam back together again. A dozen years after the unsettling incident, The Met unveiled the 6-foot, 3 ½-inch statue, along with a video on its reconstruction, last fall in a new, temporary space. And yet, it seems fitting to talk about the work in this season that is dedicated to Adam’s fall from spiritual grace and the Resurrection of the new Adam in the person of Jesus Christ.

Part of what makes this sculpture’s reconstitution and thus the subsequent exhibit so incredibly moving is the subject’s stunning beauty to begin with. The thick curls framing a face characterized by large eyes, a straight nose and full lips and winding about a graceful neck. The high chest, taut abs, long, slim haunches and sinewy calves and arms. Adam’s gorgeous, and so we can say with Hamlet, “What a fall was there.” ...

The shadow king

March 24, 2015

History, they say – whoever “they” are – is written by the victors.

Well, not exactly. Our age of revisionism and conspiracy theories, coupled with the unending vacuum that is the Internet, encourages us to consider just how victorious – or at least good – the victors really were and, thus, just how wronged the losers might’ve been.

That’s the backdrop of Pierre Briant’s “Darius in the Shadow of Alexander” (Harvard University Press, 579 pages, $39.95), newly translated by Jane Marie Todd and published in the United States after first appearing in French 12 years ago. In this book, Briant – emeritus professor of the Achaemenid world and Alexander’s empire at the Collège de France in Paris – explores how and why Darius III, who lost an empire to Alexander the Great, came to “haunt the realm of historical oblivion.” It is not, for obvious reasons, a biography. But it is a fascinating, extensively researched study of how branding can be as important as any battle.

Briant’s book arrives at a time when Persia (modern-day Iran) is very much in the news due to the controversial yet productive nuclear disarmament talks and Iran’s role in fighting ISIS – which some see as a play for greater power in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Israel’s recent discovery of coins bearing the likeness of Alexander go a long way to explaining why the Greeks – who knew how to spin – won and the Persians lost.

But first a bit of background: Some 130 years before the birth of Alexander in neighboring Macedon in July of 356 B.C., the Persians invaded Greece and burnt the Acropolis atop Athens, destroying its temples and worshipers. It was Greece’s 9/11 moment.

Alexander’s father – Philip II, king of powerful, rough-hewn Macedon and hegemon, or protector, of the more refined, resentful Greek city-states – seized upon Persian atrocity in his plans to invade Persia, liberating Greek nationals along its Mediterranean coast. But Philip – who loved much but none-too-well – was assassinated by a former male lover undoubtedly at the instigation of his ex-wife (and Alexander’s mother), Olympias. At 20, Alexander found himself heir not only to Macedon and the hegemony of the Greek city-states but to his mother’s dynastic ambitions and his father’s Persian dreams. ...

Anne Boleyn and the games men play

March 16, 2015

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. ...