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). ...
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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? ...
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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. ...
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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. ...
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There is a moment in “Casablanca” in which Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) – having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp – confronts a group of German officers in Rick’s Café Américain through music. The Germans are loudly, arrogantly singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” an anthem that has its roots in French-German antagonism, when Victor orders the house band to strike up “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, to which club owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) acquiesces. One by one the club patrons rise and join in, all but Victor’s wife – and Rick’s former lover – Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). As the others sing lustily, she sits thinking and marveling at all that has been lost and yet still remains.
It is one of the most moving moments in the history of cinema, one I couldn’t help but flashing on as the City of Light was plunged into the heart of darkness. The fans leaving the Stade de France – where one in a series of coordinated ISIS attacks took place on Friday the 13th – burst into “La Marseillaise.” The exchange students in Manhattan’s Union Square held hands as they sang it that night. And Placido Domingo led The Metropolitan Opera Chorus in it at Lincoln Center Saturday afternoon. It, too, is a symbol of all that has been lost and yet still remains. ...
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A lovely recent lunch with my pal, novelist Barbara Nachman, yielded a provocative conversation about the controversy surrounding John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” and the use – some would say, the exploitation – of other people’s lives in art.
For the uninitiated – and it’s hard to imagine any cultivated human being who is – “Klinghoffer” is the story of the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt by four Palestinians demanding the release of 50 compatriots from Israeli prisons in exchange for the ship’s safety. Leon Klinghoffer – a wheelchair-bound Jewish-American passenger celebrating his 36th wedding anniversary with terminally ill wife, Marilyn – was cruelly shot by the hijackers, his body callously thrown overboard. Ultimately, the ship was released and the hijackers were captured by the American military and tried for murder. (The ship, which had an ill-fated history to say the least, sank in 1994.)
Adams’ 1991 opera has been accused of sympathetically portraying the terrorists and thus being anti-Semitic, most recently when it was scheduled to be performed at The Metropolitan Opera and simulcast to theaters worldwide. General manager Peter Gelb’s Solomon-like decision cancelled the HD broadcast while allowing the production to go forward – a decision that has pleased neither critics nor civil libertarians and led to protests at The Met.
My friend Barbara’s objection to the work did not lie chiefly in its potential anti-Semitism or its presentation. Rather she wondered how Adams could create an opera about someone who but for his murder would never have been famous and therefore should not have had his privacy violated. (Klinghoffer’s daughters Ilsa and Lisa have denounced the work for its anti-Semitism and exploitation of their parents.)
Their objections and my friend’s concern raise a fascinating question: “Who’s in a name?,” as Barbara said to me. Why didn’t Adams change the names?
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Boy, nothing gets women piqued faster than telling them that men are the better-looking sex.
I had this conversation with two female friends recently, one of whom skeptically said to me, “Do you really believe that?”
Yes, I do, though perhaps not in the way they might think. Of course, the average woman – with her makeup and her Spanx – might be more gussied up than the average guy. But what I mean is that aesthetically, the best-looking man is better-looking than the best-looking woman, that I would take the Apollo Belvedere over the Venus de Milo any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Blame it on hormones. Male hormones give them bigger, hotter, lusher, more dangerous looks that read easily across a crowded room. Consider Colin Kaepernick, photographed by Bruce Weber on the cover of the new V Man magazine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he has a nose like a toucan, closely cropped hair and lots of tattoos, which displease some of the fashion police.
And yet – wow – those eyes, like Cognac in firelight; those long, thick lashes; that cut jawline (to go with that cut body). Ladies, ladies, do you think a woman could carry those off? ...
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