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. ...
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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. ...
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This has been a big year for the classical nude. But then again, when is it not?
From the moment the Renaissance uncovered Roman copies of sculptures of ancient Greek gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, the nude has defined our highest aspirations for the body, from the art of Donatello and Michelangelo to the neoclassical works of turn-of-the-19th century Paris to the highly formal, erotically charged photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, just to name a few.
“Not only is it the longest lasting, most influential visual form for representing the human body up to the present day, but it has also become so powerfully naturalized as merely ‘the nude’ that we have often lost the ability to see it as a specific historical type, with a particular history, geography and canon,” curator Jonathan David Katz wrote in the catalog for “Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History,” at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in Manhattan last fall. ...
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Apparently, American Pharoah was more than ready for his close-up when Vogue came calling to his home-away-from-his-Southern-California-home at Churchill Downs in Kentucky recently for the cover of its August issue, out July 23.
The coverboy – who can always check the box labeled “plays well with others” – was a perfect gentleman outside trainer Bob Baffert’s barn as he was spritzed, festooned with a garland of red roses from Susan’s Florist and snapped by Alex Lockett. The only time he went off cue was to nibble the roses’ greens. (Don’t they feed those Vogue models?) ...
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What Anna wants, Anna gets – particularly when it comes to a sleek, gorgeous, well-muscled male.
And what Anna Wintour, Condé Nast creative director and Vogue editor, wants right now is American Pharoah.
Ahmed Zayat, who has pledged that the Pharoah will belong to the American people, has told Bloodhorse, which covers the Thoroughbred industry, that AP will grace the cover of the next issue of the fashion bible.
"We are breaking new territory," Zayat, who operates his family's Zayat Stables, said June 10 in a podcast interview with Bloodhorse.com.
I’ll say. Anna has featured some studs in her day – Tim Tebow (shirtless), Colin Kaepernick, her fave Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic (Speedo), Ryan Lochte (cover, with Serena Williams and Hope Solo at the beach). Now she has a soon-to-be real stud. ...
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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.” ...
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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.) ...
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