In the show “Vicious,” which bows on PBS Sunday, June 29, Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen play two bitchy old queens, for want of a better description – indeed the Britcom was originally titled “Vicious Old Queens” – who’ve been lovers for 50 years.
Both are among the greatest actors of this or any century and long out of the closet. And the series was picked up in its native England for a second season. But some critics complained – and some here wonder – whether it plays into gay stereotypes, or whether we’re all too sensitive to political correctness.
“It’s actually a sign that we’ve all matured, and now it’s perfectly respectable to have an exaggerated, farcical representation of two people who are gay,” McKellen said in Dave Itzkoff’s piece for the June 29 New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section. “And for us to accept that they can be figures of fun, just in the same way as a farce about straight people would be.”
Maybe so, but I asked myself...
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Read MoreA new German study on brain activity during creative writing has got me thinking about one of the great intellectual mysteries: How do you write? How do I write?
It’s something that’s difficult to teach – one of the many reasons I’m not a teacher – and impossible to portray. Think about it: Movies about writers (“All The President’s Men,” “The End of the Affair”) always depict them in the throws of action or passion – which leaves very little time for writing.
In the study, Martin Lotze and his University of Greifswald team conducted brain scans while reclining subjects wrote on a propped-up writing desk. (The scanner’s magnetic field would’ve sent a computer flying.)
The novice writers showed more activity in the visual centers of the brain, while the experienced writers – who were also asked to copy some text and then riff on a short story – demonstrated more action in the speech areas. This led Lotze to conclude that the novice writers were watching their stories play out like movies while the experience writers were narrating them as if hearing an inner voice.
OK, that stopped me cold, because one of the great pleasures I’ve had since childhood is watching my stories on my brain’s big screen, and I’ve been writing fiction since I was 9...
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Read MoreA recent story in The New York Times about women missing out at the workplace, because they know less about that ultimate water-cooler subject – sports – comes at a time when Andy Murray has caused a stir at Wimbledon with his new female coach, former French star Amélie Mauresmo.
Reaction has ranged from the supportive (Maria Sharapova) to the cautious (Novak Djokovic) to the sexist (Ernst Gulblis, who said, “I am waiting for a couple of good-looking players to also quit so I can have a new coach.” Ernst, stop splitting your infinitives.
At least Ernst was, well, earnest. At Sarah Lawrence College’s recent “Publish and Promote Your Book Conference,” the reaction to my series “The Games Men Play” included the typical, “So, you’re into sports.” And it’s not said as “So – you’re into sports!” but rather with a quizzical, skeptical tone. I then find myself explaining that as a former senior cultural writer for Gannett Inc. and now editor of WAG, I’ve always had to be interested in culture with a capital “C,” which goes way beyond...
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Read MoreTony Gwynn dead June 16 at age 54 – what a shame. Think of Gwynn and you think of three things – tremendous hitter; lovely, smiling face; and class act.
I’ll never forget when Gwynn and his San Diego Padres played my beloved New York Yankees back in 1998 for the World Series. The ’98 Yanks were one of the greatest baseball teams ever assembled. Yankee aficionados put them up there with the 1927 Bombers (the so-called Murderers’ Row that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig) and the 1939 team that witnessed the passing of the torch from Gehrig to Joe DiMaggio.
So the poor Padres came up against a juggernaut in the 1998 fall classic and went down in four straight games. But Gwynn was stellar and stayed classy – gracious in victory and gracious in defeat.
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Read MoreWe’re all patterns in the universe, swimmer Daniel Reiner-Kahn reasons in my new novel “Water Music.” But sometimes it’s only when we’re at the end of a journey – maybe even life’s journey – that we understand how the strands came together. At other times, we recognize how the strands fit as they’re being woven.
Last week, I had an onstage conversation with film critic Marshall Fine at the Emelin Theatre in Mamaroneck, N.Y. about the relationship between language and images after a screening of “Words and Pictures,” which opens this Friday, May 23. It’s the story of a tempestuous rivalry between a prickly artist (Juliette Binoche) and a showoff writer (Clive Owen). Four days later, the writer (me) and the artist (David Hutchinson) came together more happily at a reading from “Water Music” at The Lionheart Gallery in Pound Ridge. After, I opened up the floor for a discussion about David’s paintings and drawings there, which are based on the perverse writings of Jean Genet.
First, a few words about “Words and Pictures,” a rather contrived but nonetheless absorbing movie about a love-hate relationship that sparks a contest between the artist’s students and the writer’s. It occurred to me after that the only arena in which men and women compete is the intellectual one.
Read MoreWhen I was a child, one of my favorite books was Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” set against the backdrop of revolutionary Paris and its archrival, London.
It’s a story about many different kinds of rivals and doubles, chiefly Charles Darnay, who’s noble in every sense of the word but finds himself paying for the aristocratic sins of his family, and Sydney Carton, the ne’er-do-well English barrister who nonetheless is capable of great courage and love.
Both men are in love with Lucie Manette, the daughter of a doctor whose mind has been ravaged by his imprisonment in Paris. Darnay wins her but Carton, who could be his twin, remains devoted. And when Darnay is unjustly imprisoned by revolutionaries and condemned to the guillotine, Carton hits on a plan to change places with him. But first he undergoes some soul-searching, wandering the streets of Paris. He takes comfort in the biblical words he once heard at a funeral:
“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whoever so liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
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Read MoreAt the end of Sassy Ladies Shopping Night Out last Friday at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Tarrytown, a vendor approached the table where I was selling my new novel, “Water Music.” She had been by earlier, but our conversation had been cut short by the appearance of customers at her table. Now true to her word, she came back as I was packing up and bought a copy.
She had told me that her son was gay, coming out to her when he was 14, and I could sense all the pain of that reality, not because she rejected him but because no mother likes to see her child rejected by others. She couldn’t quite understand why I – with no such similar narrative – would’ve, could’ve written a novel like "Water Music," whose four gay athletes whose professional rivalries color their personal relationships with one another. I told her that being a man didn’t stop Tolstoy from writing “Anna Karenina.”
“Yes, but at least he knew what it was like to make love to a woman.”
True, but he didn’t know what a woman feels like when she makes love to a man.
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