Christmas sunrise – and sunset

December 25, 2014

For years on Christmas when my beloved Aunt Mary was alive, I would read aloud a portion of John Milton’s “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” from “Greece in Poetry,” edited by Simoni Zafiropoulos (Harry N. Abrams Inc.). It was my tradition, and since her death in 2011, I’ve shared it at Christmastide on whatever blog I’ve written.

I share it with you now as a reminder that everyone’s sunrise is someone else’s sunset and that Jesus came into the world as the new Apollo – not a mercurial god of the sun but a compassionate God of light.

Merry Christmas. ...

Rafael Nadal and Michael Phelps: The big reveals

December 22, 2014

Both Rafael Nadal and Michael Phelps took big steps in revealing a little more of themselves this past week.

Rafa – on the comeback trail again as he prepares for the Australian Open – was named spokesmodel for Tommy Hilfiger. If his underwear ads turn out to be half as sensuous as his videos for Armani – stripped down to ripped jeans under a waterfall – well, then, all I can say is “Rrrrrrrrrrr.”

Michael, who knows a thing or two about stripping down, found himself in an emotionally vulnerable moment, pleading guilty to drunk driving. He was given the maximum sentence of one year in prison, which was suspended in favor of a supervised probation that includes random drug and alcohol testing and mandatory attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. ...

The winter of the Niners’ discontent

December 21, 2014

It’s with a heavy heart that I speculate about the future of my San Francisco 49ers.

How is it that a team that was so strong could become so lackluster with virtually the same personnel that went to the Super Bowl in 2013 and lost to the Seattle Seahawks in the playoffs this year – a game that many considered the real Super Bowl given how badly the Denver Broncos would play against the Seahawks in the actual Super Bowl?

But that was yesterday, and that is sport, as Novak Djokovic likes to say. In life, you’re only as good as your present success, and that’s never truer than in sport where teams mystifyingly rise and fall, sometimes within a season.

What role has Coach Jim Harbaugh played in all this – he of the dad corduroys and the heart-on-his-sleeve temperament? The seeds of his exit may have been sown in 2012 when he sought to get rid of quarterback Alex Smith – at first surreptitiously and then overtly after Smith suffered a concussion and was replaced by Colin Kaepernick, who took the team all the way to the Super Bowl.

Oh, the ironies: The Niners originally chose Smith over his high school rival Aaron Rodgers, who, miffed, went off to the Green Bay Packers – and legend. What if they had chosen Rodgers instead? Would I even be writing this post?

Colin is a mystery even to people like me who adore him. Brilliant, beautiful and hostile to a media that alternately fawns over and taunts him, he spent the off-season giving TMZ ammunition for a false date-rape charge by the company he kept. His curt responses to the local beat reporters, who try to ingratiate themselves as their job success depends in part on the team’s good will, do him no credit and will no doubt earn him no sympathy now that his season has headed south.

‘The Inteview’ and our obsession with ‘authenticity’

December 19, 2014

So Sony has put the kibosh on “Interview,” the Seth Rogan/Evan Goldberg comedy about bungling American journos attempting to assassinate Kim Jong-un – which, let’s face it, is a lose, lose, lose situation for everyone.

“The bad guys won,” inveterate tweeter Mia Farrow pronounced. But whom is she kidding? No movie theater is going to show a flick that audience members sit through looking over their shoulders – as The Christian Science Monitor shrewdly observes.

Trust me, I know. I went to see “The Dark Knight Rises” with my pal novelist Barbara Nachman shortly after a gunman opened fire at a screening of the movie in a Colorado theater. We spent most of the movie watching every young man who came in or, especially, left and came back. That’s not entertainment.

As with any complex story involving hacking, terrorist threats in a post-9/11 world, freedom of speech and corporate profits, there’s another side to “The Interview” debacle.

What if Rogan and company had simply made the North Korean dictator a fictional character?

Charlie Chaplin did it in “The Great Dictator” (1940), playing both a Jewish everyman through which we see the disastrous circumstances that plunged Europe into two world wars and a certain dictator, one Adenoid Hynkel of Tomainia. Of course, it was Hitler right down to his little moustache. (How any woman ever found him attractive is beyond me.) Of course, it stirred up antifascist sentiments at the time America was not yet in the fight – which was just what Chaplin wanted to do. Still, Chaplin could say, “Any resemblance to persons living or dead,” etc. ...

More adventures in publishing

December 17, 2014

At the risk of sounding like something out of “Forrest Gump” (“Life is like a box of chocolates”), life is like a skyscraper: You can’t really see it until you step back from it.

I had that sense at the Algonkian Writer Conference I attended Dec. 11-14 at the Ripley Greer Studios on the skirts of Manhattan’s Fashion District. The conference was designed to help writers from all over the country and all walks of life achieve one goal – to be able to pitch their stories to the agents/editors we met in the hopes that they would take them on.

I certainly think our workshop group of 11 professionals, who bonded almost instantly, achieved that goal in the sense that we perfected our pitch letters. What began as something unformed came into focus at the end of four days, thanks in large part to our insightful, sympathetic workshop leader, Susan Breen, who teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. (That she’s also the author of “The Fiction Class” means she not only talks the talk, she walks the walk.) In the process, I learned something about myself not only as a writer but as a magazine editor.

The NFL’s new conduct policy: You’ll need a scorecard

December 11, 2014

The NFL has announced its new conduct policy, and frankly, I’d rather study nuclear physics or the tax code.

The penalties will be tougher for violations, of course, including domestic violence. But they won’t be implemented by commish Roger Goodell, even though the NFL will rely more on policing itself. No, there will be a special counsel to implement the conduct code, which goes into effect immediately even though the special counsel has yet to be appointed.

And there’s a new conduct committee as well, made up of owners, among others. I guess the committee will help implement the policy, which the players’ union didn’t see before the announcement. The union was a little miffed about that, as unions are wont to be.

Does anyone else’s head ache? What a load of hooey: The NFL is taking on more policing of its own organization, which it should’ve done in the first place, but Goodell – who is in effect the NFL’s CEO, as in chief executive officer, as in the person who chiefly executes – can’t implement the policy. You need three more layers of bureaucracy. Geez Louise, this makes Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner who immediately canned the bigoted misanthrope Donald Sterling, look like Eliot Ness. ...

The swimmer

December 10, 2014

Question: Who is the greatest short-course swimmer to date?

Hint: It isn’t Michael Phelps or Mark Spitz or Johnny Weissmuller.

It’s Ryan Lochte, whose 21st gold medal came in the 800-meter free relay at the FINA World Short Course Championships Thursday in Doha. It was the event that launched him on the road to short-course history in 2004.

Lochte doesn’t always get the respect he deserves. For one thing, he has swum in the shadow of Michael Phelps – much as Novak Djokovic has played in the shadow of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. And it’s never easy to be “merely” excellent in the face of immortality.

For another, Lochte did himself no favors at the London Olympics, at which he was supposed to emerge from Phelps’ shadow, by underperforming – if you can call five medals underperforming – and allowing himself to be packaged as a frat-boy airhead.

The real Ryan Lochte is a superb swimmer with a big heart who gives away medals to youngsters at meets, signs every autograph, opens his home to fellow swimmers when they need a place to stay and even drove hundreds of miles to attend the funeral of a swimmer he didn’t even know. And while he may not be intellectual, he’s smarter and more articulate in interviews than our TMZ culture would have you believe.