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Why football won’t go up in smoke

November 10, 2014

The cover story for the Nov. 9 New York Times Magazine asks the provocative question: Is football the next tobacco?

The answer is “No,” and the key to that answer lies not in football or tobacco but in something else – influenza.

Like the flu, tobacco is airborne. If you were to smoke in let’s say an NFL arena, you would be subjecting not only yourself but the people all around you to carcinogens. Tobacco lost its household brand identity, because enough people came to understand that it wasn’t just about other people smoking themselves to death. It was also about how secondhand smoke could kill you.

But when you go to that same NFL arena to watch a game, you’re not risking a brain injury; someone else is. And for many people, that is, selfish or not, an acceptable risk.

President Barack Obama, a Chicago Bears fan, may have voiced the sentiment of a nation when he said that if he had a son, he would not let him play football. And yet, he says, he will remain a fan.

“At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” Michael Sokolove quotes him as saying in The Times Magazine piece. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret.”

The president is a rational, compassionate man. So are we all – rational, compassionate people who are comfortable with other people bashing their brains in for our amusement, because, hey, they know what they’re getting into, much like a prostitute or a stripper or a porn star. It’s just another meat market. ...

The return of Lestat

October 29, 2014

With Halloween-y coming up on Friday, I thought it a good moment to touch on the new Anne Rice, which brings her back to her greatest creation, the Vampire Lestat.

Or at least to his world. He seems to be the absent sun around which the other characters revolve in “Prince Lestat” (Knopf, $28.95, 451 pages). But then he often is in the later “Vampire Chronicles” novels.

It’s easy to make fun of Rice’s purple prose and bizarr-o plotting. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Terrence Rafferty writes:

Lestat’s vampirism dates from the late 18th century, but his star quality seems very much the product of the time in which Rice gave birth to him, the 1970s: “Interview With the Vampire” reads like a People magazine profile written by Ann Radcliffe. (People had begun publication just a couple of years earlier.) Although the style, mixing celebrity-worshiping gush with Gothic portentousness, is, not to put too fine a point on it, nutty, Rice wielded it with amazing self-assurance, as if it were inevitable, something that had been waiting to be discovered. That’s what all pop-culture geniuses do, in their different ways. And over nearly four decades and many, many books, she has seen no reason to change it. In “Prince Lestat,” the first Vampire Chronicles novel in a decade, Rice’s queenly prose is unaltered. Time cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite monotony.

But back in the 1970s when the gay rights movement was young and AIDS was lurking in the wings, Rice’s homoerotic bloodsuckers tapped into the zeitgeist – something that Rafferty himself alludes to. It’s what all great pop novelists do, be they John Grisham or J.K. Rowling. ...

Whose life is it anyway? ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ and appropriation art

October 26, 2014

A lovely recent lunch with my pal, novelist Barbara Nachman, yielded a provocative conversation about the controversy surrounding John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” and the use – some would say, the exploitation – of other people’s lives in art.

For the uninitiated – and it’s hard to imagine any cultivated human being who is – “Klinghoffer” is the story of the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt by four Palestinians demanding the release of 50 compatriots from Israeli prisons in exchange for the ship’s safety. Leon Klinghoffer – a wheelchair-bound Jewish-American passenger celebrating his 36th wedding anniversary with terminally ill wife, Marilyn – was cruelly shot by the hijackers, his body callously thrown overboard. Ultimately, the ship was released and the hijackers were captured by the American military and tried for murder. (The ship, which had an ill-fated history to say the least, sank in 1994.)

Adams’ 1991 opera has been accused of sympathetically portraying the terrorists and thus being anti-Semitic, most recently when it was scheduled to be performed at The Metropolitan Opera and simulcast to theaters worldwide. General manager Peter Gelb’s Solomon-like decision cancelled the HD broadcast while allowing the production to go forward – a decision that has pleased neither critics nor civil libertarians and led to protests at The Met.

My friend Barbara’s objection to the work did not lie chiefly in its potential anti-Semitism or its presentation. Rather she wondered how Adams could create an opera about someone who but for his murder would never have been famous and therefore should not have had his privacy violated. (Klinghoffer’s daughters Ilsa and Lisa have denounced the work for its anti-Semitism and exploitation of their parents.)

Their objections and my friend’s concern raise a fascinating question: “Who’s in a name?,” as Barbara said to me. Why didn’t Adams change the names?

Lassie came home

August 18, 2014

Like a star who’s found new life in the age of the Internet, Lassie’s on the comeback trail as pitchdog and charity ambassador. And I’m among the millions who are thrilled.

As with many a boomer, I grew up with the TV series (1954-73), still in syndication, and the various movies that found their way to the tube. And, not surprisingly, I had a Lassie and later on Lassie 2.0, whom we called Sassy. (Yes, I know, lame, but I loved that dog, who was a rescue, and all the animals we had and ah!, don’t get me started.)

I also had the pleasure of interviewing Bob Weatherwax – son of dog trainer Rudd Weatherwax – whose pooch, Pal, played “Lassie” in the 1943 film “Lassie Come Home.” Bob told me fascinating stuff about how trainers use physical commands to elicit seemingly emotional responses from canine actors. He also confirmed what is one of the most intriguing aspects of Lassie...

Robin Williams, dead in apparent suicide

August 12, 2014

Today brought the shocking news of Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams’ death at 63 from asphyxia in an apparent suicide.

Suicide always begs the question, Why? Why would someone who had so much end it all? It’s the theme of a very good, underrated early Keanu Reeves movie, “Permanent Record,” about a golden student who takes his own life and the friends who are left to wonder, Well if that can happen to someone so together, what about the rest of us?

Except that suicides don’t think of themselves as being very together people. As I said in my novel “Water Music,” many suicides don’t want to die. They want not to live, which is a very different thing...

'Hercules,' part deux

August 11, 2014

Following a train of thought, I thought I’d expand on the previous post concerning the new movie “Hercules.”

I suppose there is a segment of society that won’t see it – or admit to seeing it. But to me pop culture is culture, too, and thus a starting point for intellectual discussion. Indeed, the film sent me scurrying to my bookshelves for a childhood favorite, Philip E. Slater’s psychoanalytic “The Glory of Hera” (Beacon Press), a book so old that it cost $3.95. (Actually, it’s not that old. It was published in 1968.)

Slater paints a portrait of a complex character – a man who is at once gay and straight, masculine and feminine, a lover of family and its destroyer, mother-identified and mother-loathing, victim and victimizer, monster and martyr, all-too-human being and transcendent god. Hercules – Heracles in Greek – is all this, because his myth changed as Greece evolved. He is a metaphor then for the birth of a nation. And more...

The Rock rolls in “Hercules”

August 10, 2014

"I like the gods,” my friend novelist and movie blogger Barbara Nachman says as we exit the new “Hercules,” starring Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, in the title role.

I do, too. The Greek gods were among my childhood companions, offering thrilling stories and transcendence without the guilt trip of modern religion. (A well-known classicist, who shall remain nameless here, once told me she would take the Greek gods over the Abrahamic one any day of the week and twice on Sundays, so to speak.)

This being the age of post-modernism, the gods are nowhere to be found in the new “Hercules,” and that’s too bad, because they’re such an entertaining lot and because the ancient Greeks believed in them – or at least the stories they could spin off of them – so passionately. (Certainly, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great did. He saw Hercules – Heracles in Greek, Hercules in Latin – as one of his paternal ancestors.)

Making a movie about an ancient Greek legend when you imply that the legend is really part PR campaign, part empowerment exercise, well, it doesn’t quite cut it, does it?

Otherwise, the new “Herc” is a not-bad movie that fits...