15 millennia of fame

March 18, 2014

One of the great pleasures of reading the Weekend New York Times – apart from the opportunity it affords me to collapse with breakfast, lunch or a cup of coffee – is trolling for blog ideas. The March 16 edition of The New York Times magazine yielded a doozy – a map, as it were, of a new project from the Macro Connections group at M.I.T.’s Media Lab called Pantheon. The odd thing is that The Times’ article doesn’t give the website. But here it is.

This being from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pantheon has come up with a complex formula to measure historical cultural production. I won’t bore you with methodology – because I’m not smart enough to. But what’s fascinating to me is what piqued The Times’ interest: What does Pantheon say about fame and celebrity? Something I and others have long suspected and that should give our notice-me, selfie society pause: Fame and celebrity are not the same thing.

In “Frozen,” Elsa embraces her magical powers as she sings “Let It Go.”

Are men the hotter sex? Or are women just ‘Frozen’?

March 9, 2014

It’s been a week since the Oscars, but Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress acceptance speech is still trending with me. Or rather, Maureen Dowd’s riff on it is.

Blanchett implied that her Oscar win for “Blue Jasmine” proved that films with women at the center aren’t “niche experiences.” Dowd’s March 5 column “Frozen in a Niche?” demonstrated otherwise:

“The percentage of women directing, writing, producing, editing and shooting films has declined since 1998, according to an analysis of the top 250 grossing films of 2013 by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. (The anticipated halo effect from Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win a directing Oscar for 2009’s “The Hurt Locker” never happened.)

“The center’s latest report had some stunning stats: Women accounted for 6 percent of directors, 10 percent of writers, 15 percent of executive producers, 17 percent of editors and 3 percent of cinematographers. And women are still more likely to be working on romantic comedies, dramas or documentaries than the top-grossing, teenage-boy-luring animated, sci-fi and horror movies.”

Sound like a niche to me. Mais pourquoi?

Nole + Andy = Love at the Garden

March 4, 2014

World Tennis Day – which was celebrated March 3 with marquee matchups of past and present stars around the globe – featured something that Andy Murray said we were not likely to see again. He and Novak Djokovic squared off in the “BNP Paribas Showdown,” an exhibition that reminded us what makes tennis and friendship so great.

A tennis exo – as exhibitions are sometimes called – is a bit like a rock concert mixed with a boxing match. There’s smoke (no mirrors). There are lighting effects and an irresistible beat. There’s an announcer who pronounces everyone’s name dramatically.

Jason Collins, the gay Jackie Robinson

February 25, 2014

Jason Collins has rejoined the Nets with a difference: He becomes the first openly gay athlete in any of America’s four major sports.

There’s lots of symbolism here: The team now plays in Brooklyn, where Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball. The Nets are owned by Mikhail D. Prokhorov, from Russia, which has taken a tough anti-gay stance. And Collins will wear his regular No. 98, in honor of Matthew Shepard, the college student who was murdered for being gay in 1998.

Collins may soon be joined in pro sports by Michael Sam, who’s just come out and is on-target to be drafted by the NFL.

All of which makes me look prescient for publishing “Water Music,” a novel about four gay athletes and how their shifting rivalries color their personal relationships with one another.

Sochi, au revoir

February 24, 2014

So the Winter Olympics are over, and while I’ll miss the intensity of the pass two weeks, I realize it’s also impossible to sustain that intensity forever. (Still, on to the Paralympics, which begin March 7.)

When a global event ends, I always like to stop and consider what I’ve learned. I think the first takeaway from these Games is that they really represented a changing of the guard. Continuing a theme that has played out all season first at the Australian Open and then at the Super Bowl, the sure thing wasn’t. In Sochi, the heavy favorites – the Shaun Whites, the Shani Davises, the Bode Millers – weren’t necessarily atop or even on the podium. Instead we were introduced to medalists like skaters Yuzuru Hanyu and Yulia Lipnitskaia and skiers Matthias Mayer and Michaela Shiffrin, just to name a few.

Why did many Olympic veterans struggle?

Dances with Tara and Johnny

February 23, 2014

The penultimate night of the Sochi Games brought us the Figure Skating Gala, in which the top finishers in the various skating disciplines put on an exhibition that was more relaxed and playful than the competition. In that spirit, NBC invited free-wheeling NBCSN commentators Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir to sit at the big people’s table, as it were, and offer commentary on NBC in prime time. Both Tara and Johnny, who’ve earned raves for their repartee, sported gold sprigs in their hair that Tara said were Sochi flowers. Sidekick Terry Gannon – whom some in the press have dubbed the pair’s chaperone – wore his in his lapel. The hairpieces brought to mind Pauline Kael’s famously acidic review of “Dances With Wolves,” in which she said “Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.”

NBC actually showed little of the event in prime time. Among the highlights were Gracie Gold’s sassy salute to Fosse, her hometown of Chicago and “Chicago” with “All That Jazz”; gold medalists Meryl Davis and Charlie White’s balletic skate to the Adagio from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2; and Yuna Kim’s simply stunning interpretation of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

The latest on Olympic figure skating: Send in the clowns

February 22, 2014

Where would the Olympics be without the drama and simultaneous comic relief that is figure skating?

Thursday night was the latest chapter in the farce as Russia’s Adelina Sotnikova beat the seamless defending champ, South Korea’s Yuna Kim, for the ladies’ gold medal by five whole points. The decisive margin of victory, Kim’s clearly superior artistic (and let’s face it, overall) performance and the revelation that the judges included the wife of the head of the Russian skating federation and a Ukrainian involved in a 1998 ice dance controversy has led 1.7 million to petition for reform on change.org.

Good luck with that. The current convoluted system, which would require an Einstein to parse, was put in place to counteract the kind of abuse being alleged now. In the frozen world of figure skating, the Cold War never ends.