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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Read MoreDzhokhar Tsarnaev has apologized for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing.
“I am sorry for the lives that I’ve taken, for the suffering I’ve caused you, for the damage I’ve done – irreparable damage,” he said in court Wednesday. “I’m guilty of it. If there is any lingering doubt of that, let it be no more.”
Is he truly sorry, and does it make a difference? Should we expect the same from Dylann Storm Roof, charged with the murder of nine in the Charleston church? Fat chance. That one will probably go to his grave Timothy McVeigh-like.
“‘The evil that men do lives after them,’” Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. told the Boston court, quoting Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” “‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’ So it will be for Dzokhar Tsarnaev.” ...
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Read MoreJust in time for Wimbledon (June 29 through July 12), teNeues offers “The Stylish Life: Tennis,” a new coffee table book that ranges over the art, fashion and personalities of the modern game that began in the late 19th century. It’s a book that had me at the back cover.
The photograph (also reproduced opposite the Table of Contents) depicts the green tennis courts of Italy’s Il San Pietro di Positano resort spilling onto the jagged, pristine blue Amalfi Coast. That photograph and the reproduction of a Roger Broders poster circa 1930, with its clay courts tumbling onto a periwinkle Mediterranean Sea in Monte Carlo, are precisely what I imagined in “Water Music,” my debut novel, when my athlete-heroes vacation on the island of Mykonos. ...
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Read MoreKudos to Novak Djokovic, Aaron Rodgers and American Pharoah, all among the nominees for ESPYS (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly).
AP got the nod in the Best Championship Performance category, along with San Francisco Giants’ ace (and World Series star) Madison Bumgarner, Florida Softball’s Lauren Haeger and LeBron James. No word yet on whether the Pharoah will attend, although his jockey and fellow nominee Victor Espinoza will no doubt be there.
Nole got two noms – Best International Athlete along with Formula One’s Lewis Hamilton, the LPGA’s Lydia Ko and soccer’s Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo; and Best Male Tennis Player, along with Roger Federer, Stan Wawrinka and Marin Cilic. Aaron was also a double nominees as Best NFL Player (along with Tom Brady, Antonio Brown, DeMarco Murray and JJ Watt) and Best Male Athlete, with Watt again, James and Stephen Curry. ...
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Read MoreHistory is not merely written by winners. It’s dictated by them. That’s true at Wimbledon. And it’s especially true in war.
The controversy over a Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina State House that has erupted anew in the wake of the Charleston mass murders is yet another example of our failure to understand this. The South lost the Civil War. And the losers do not get to display the trophies of war. If they did, the Nazi flag would be flying over Germany today. How long do you think the former Allies would tolerate that? ...
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Read MoreThis 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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Read MoreLike Dolly Levi, American Pharoah is back where he belongs – home, sweet home, Santa Anita.
And the Pharoah will be parading there for the faithful between races on Gold Cup at Santa Anita Day.
“We want to thank American Pharoah’s owner, Ahmed Zayat, and his trainer, Bob Baffert, for being so incredibly generous in sharing this horse with fans from coast to coast,’ said Santa Anita Chairman Keith Brackpool. “We’re excited to present him to the public on June 27. It should make for a tremendous day for those joining us on track and on television throughout the world.” ...
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