Years ago, I had a dream job with Gannett Inc. as senior cultural writer. One of my beats was to cover the big arts stories of the day and so it was that I found myself on one occasion interviewing Richard Cragun the American-born star of the Stuttgart Ballet and one of the finest male dancers of the 20th century.
In those days, Gannett recycled our stories in its many publications, and my Cragun piece found its way into one of the tabloids overseen by a favorite editor who was fond of the Daily News and New York Post. It was with some sheepishness then that I handed the publicist a copy of the publication with the words “Ballet Hunk” in the headlines. I needn’t have worried. He was thrilled.
I covered most of the great “ballet hunks” of the 20th and early-21st centuries ...
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Read MoreThe latest salvo in the culture war that is surely to deepen under President Donald Trump was fired by Meryl Streep in a graceful and grace-filled speech at the Golden Globes.
I’m not a fan of people using award shows as a bully pulpit, coming of age as I did in the 1970s when such Oscar speeches (think Vanessa Redgrave and an absent Marlon Brando) were a kind of cliché. I’m not a fan of gesture politics like refusing to stand for the National Anthem. I’m not even a fan of Meryl Streep, a sometimes mannered actress (“Sophie’s Choice,” “The Hours”) who’s nevertheless capable of great work (“Marvin’s Room,” “The Manchurian Candidate”).
But Streep – a hard-working craftswoman who has paid her dues – offered a master class in a performer giving a political speech by turning the concept of the politician as performer inside out. ...
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Read MoreMy contractor and friend gave me a telling gift for Christmas – a Veronese bronze of the Greek Titan Atlas.
He brings a mature, Herculean masculinity to a collection that includes several younger Apollos, Davids and St. Michaels, along with, of course, many Alexanders. But beyond that Atlas’ burden is both illustrative of and instructive for our time.
After the Titans lost their battle with the Olympians, sky/chief god Zeus condemned Atlas to hold up the sky at the western edge of the Earth, so sky and Earth could not resume their amorous relationship. In ancient times, Atlas was depicted shouldering the celestial spheres, a tradition upheld in Lee Lawrie’s colossal bronze at Rockefeller Center. ...
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Read MoreWith the recent death of Fidel Castro – and the return of “The Hollow Crown” series to PBS, based on Shakespeare’s Henry and Richard histories – my thoughts turn to Vergina, the highlight of My Big Fat Greek Odyssey and a place were leaders were made and unmade.
It was here in the ancient capital of Aigai that Philip II was assassinated on his daughter Cleopatra’s wedding day in a kind of “Godfather” moment. It was here that his son and Cleopatra’s full brother, Alexander, became king. And it was here that the ancient burial mounds of kings of Macedon were unearthed by archaeologist Manolis Andronokis in 1977.
Today, a museum sits on the site, with another coming. We arrived on a rainy morning and were immediately delivered into a world that is overwhelming. This is a dark space that throws the treasures it protects into dramatic relief. Crowns of gold leaves. ...
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Read MoreThe Bookends column of The New York Times Book Review – which each week poses a provocative question that two writers then answer in essay form, often offering diametrically opposed viewpoints – had a goodie for Thanksgiving weekend: “Are domestic responsibilities at odds with becoming a great artist?”
It’s a question I’ve wrestled with periodically but particularly at holiday time when gathering with married family members makes me acutely aware of my singleton status. I often suspect that the invitations are accompanied by a tacit, “Poor thing, what else would she do, where else would she go?” as much as by a genuine desire to see me. And, indeed, if this were the 19th-century such a woman would be an object of pity, Jane Austen notwithstanding. ...
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Read MoreFreud said there were no such things as accidents so it should come as no surprise that The New York Times would carry a front page story on women who decided against reconstruction after mastectomy – complete with fascinating photographs of their flat, scarred and, in many cases, beautifully tattooed chests – at a moment that The Frick Collection in Manhattan is exhibiting “Cagnacci’s ‘Repentant Magdalene’” (through Jan. 22).
As several Times posters noted, the newspaper would not be displaying those photos had the breast cancer survivors had one or both breasts. And that’s in part because of artists like Guido Cagnacci, the Italian Baroque master whose subjects included Cleopatra and who helped sexualize the female body and female breasts in particular. ...
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Read MoreAs fabulous as the Times Journeys’ “The Legacy of Alexander the Great” was thus far, I still wasn’t feeling Alexander. Athens had never been a home to him, even after he sent the city 300 Persian shields – a brutal souvenir of the victorious opening gambit in his quest to conquer the Persian Empire, the Battle of the Granicus. Plutarch – and tour leader David Ratzan – tell us that Alexander signed the tribute “Alexander, son of Philip and all the Greeks except the Spartans,” the Spartans rarely taking part in anything the other city-states, especially archrival Athens, did.
You get the sense that perhaps Alexander was doing a bit of kissing up to the Athenians, who saw him, Philip and the rest of the Macedonians as rough-hewn arrivistes. (It’s the reason that Oliver Stone cleverly had the Greeks speak with British accents in his movie “Alexander” and the Macedonians speak with Irish ones, the idea being that the Greeks looked down at the Macedonians just as the British have looked down on the Irish.) ...
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