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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You would think that for two people who had reached the pinnacle of their profession, the world would be their oyster.
But no, no, things didn’t work out that way for Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic though it’s certainly not for lack of effort on their part.
Holder of the Serena Slam (all four Slam titles at once), Serena will no doubt win the US Open that begins on Aug. 29 and succeed Steffi Graf by capturing the Grand Slam (the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open) in one calendar year. She will be remembered as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, to play the game. Simply put, there is Serena and there is everyone else ...
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Stanford research scholar Adrienne Mayor – a National Book Award finalist for “The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy” – has a new book out, “The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World” (Princeton University Press, 519 pages, $29.95).
It blows the lid off the myth of the one-breasted she-males who kidnapped men for sex, abandoning any resulting male offspring, to paint a portrait of those Eurasian women who once and still live like men. ...
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Disturbing story on the front page of The New York Times’ July 1 edition about the stalkers whom female tennis players face, among them a guy after No. 3-ranked Simona Halep – I see no reason to give him publicity here by naming him – who became increasingly hostile after seeing a rumor that she was to marry.
It was interesting to read the accompanying comments, which as usual were all over the place, with some pointing out that male players also have crazy fans, that these women are better protected than the average woman, etc. ...
Read MoreOK, I must take a moment away from the Supremes and their historic decisions this week to protest the idea of getting rid of Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill in favor of a woman.
Alexander Hamilton? The man who gave us shopping? It’s not surprising that there’s a hit Broadway musical about him. The guy was all about the cash. Say what you want about Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, but Hamilton understood that “Power without revenue is a mere bauble.” Precisely. The reason we are the richest nation on earth is because of Hamilton. ...
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We live in interesting times. Yesterday the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, 6-3. Chief John Roberts, you’re my new hero. This is actually the second time you’ve saved Obamacare, so I’m playing Britney Spears “Oops!...I Did It Again” just for you.
But then… you lose points for voting against gay marriage (5-4 in favor though, yeah!) and then there was that whole Aztec reference – a slippery slope, don’t you think? The Aztecs believed in ripping out the beating hearts of the conquered and the sacrificed and donning their eviscerated skins. I wouldn’t go there. ...
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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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