‘The undiscovered country’: Oscar Isaacs in ‘Hamlet’

July 25, 2017

I am a collector of “Hamlets.”

My first stage experience of Shakespeare’s best play occurred when I was 15 and saw the now-defunct American Shakespeare Festival’s production with Brian Bedford in the title role. It was striped tights, codpieces and an emphasis on Hamlet’s friendship with Horatio. I can still see Bedford, whom I would later interview about the part, being carried off the stage at the end – his head thrown back, his long, dark hair cascading. I loved it, though that may not have been my first “Hamlet” experience. ...

No bull: ‘Fearless Girl’s’ ancient Greek evocation

April 17, 2017

The controversy over the faceoff between “Fearless Girl” and “Charging Bull” on Wall Street has raised all sorts of psychosexual and political implications.

Some have seen the 4-foot-girl – hands on hips, chest puffed like a sail heading into the wind – as a symbol of feminist ideals. Apparently, that’s what sponsor State Street Global Advisors, which wants to encourage more women in the boardroom, had in mind. ...

Whose art is it anyway?

April 3, 2017

The painting shows a young black man in a coffin, his face a blur of color in the manner of Abstract Expressionist art – and violent death.

The departed, then, is not just someone who has succumbed to the ills that the flesh is heir to. Emmett Till was just 14 years old when he was lynched by two white men for flirting with the wife of one of them. “Open Casket, “ on view at the Whitney Biennial, is Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting of a mutilated Till in the open casket his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on. The work has drawn protests and condemnation from black artists and writers, who question the right of a white woman to appropriate a searing moment in black history. ...

Beauty in the ‘Beast’

March 29, 2017

A shoutout to the new film version of “Beauty and the Beast,” which proves you can build on previous iterations and make something that is related but individual.

Of the three Walt Disney versions using Alan Menken’s score – which also include an acclaimed animated movie and a Broadway musical – this latest interpretation is by far the most adult (although kids will still enjoy it). ...

Engaging Trump: Not just black and white

November 21, 2016

What should be the response of the loyal opposition to President-elect Donald Trump?

In the wake of the election shocker, we’ve seen people veer between extremes – Colin Kaepenick on the one hand, the cast of “Hamilton” on the other – when the Buddhist middle way might prove more prudent.

Kaepenick didn’t bother to vote, because neither major candidate was to his liking. This was a problem for many people. But as the Lotto saying goes, “You gotta be in it to win it.” And a vote for no one is still a vote for someone – in the most passive of ways.

Kaepernick’s non-vote smacked of the illogical and the racist.

"I think it would be hypocritical of me to vote," Kaepernick said. "I'd said from the beginning I was against oppression, I was against a system of oppression. I'm not going to show support for that system. And, to me, the oppressor isn't going to allow you to vote your way out of your oppression."

Was the system oppressive, Colin, when it enacted the Civil Rights Act? How about when Barack Obama – who, like you, is biracial – became president? ...

Free to be you, me – and someone else

October 8, 2016

Culture vulture that I am, I somehow missed the cultural appropriation wars that have erupted. That’s what you get for going on vacation and unplugging.

First, novelist Lionel Shriver apparently set off a firestorm at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival with a defense of artists using other people’s races, ethnicities, sexualities, etc. in their creations. Then Claudio Gatti outed the comfortable Roman translator Anita Raja as the author of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante novels about the friendship between two poor Neapolitan girls.

Meanwhile, Bristol University cancelled a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” because students protested white people playing Egyptians and Ethiopians. ...

The terrorist bombings and the literature of rejection

November 19, 2015

If you’re a reader of this blog, then you know that one of its motifs – which also occurs in my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding” – is what I call “the literature of rejection,” that is the disproportionate rage at rejection found among certain antiheroes in literature and among assassins, mass murderers and terrorists.

I was reminded of this – or rather, my sharp-as-a-tack blog administrator reminded me of it – in reading an interview with Arie Kruglanski, co-director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), founded in 2005 at the University of Maryland with funds from the Department of Homeland Security.

Kruglanski has walked the walk. He was born in Nazi-occupied Poland and spent 15 years teaching psychology at Tel Aviv University. In this interview he echoes 19th-century psychologist-philosopher William James’ view of heroism as a primary spur in human nature, even unto, and perhaps especially if it means, death itself. ...