Robin Williams, dead in apparent suicide

August 12, 2014

Today brought the shocking news of Oscar-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams’ death at 63 from asphyxia in an apparent suicide.

Suicide always begs the question, Why? Why would someone who had so much end it all? It’s the theme of a very good, underrated early Keanu Reeves movie, “Permanent Record,” about a golden student who takes his own life and the friends who are left to wonder, Well if that can happen to someone so together, what about the rest of us?

Except that suicides don’t think of themselves as being very together people. As I said in my novel “Water Music,” many suicides don’t want to die. They want not to live, which is a very different thing...

'Hercules,' part deux

August 11, 2014

Following a train of thought, I thought I’d expand on the previous post concerning the new movie “Hercules.”

I suppose there is a segment of society that won’t see it – or admit to seeing it. But to me pop culture is culture, too, and thus a starting point for intellectual discussion. Indeed, the film sent me scurrying to my bookshelves for a childhood favorite, Philip E. Slater’s psychoanalytic “The Glory of Hera” (Beacon Press), a book so old that it cost $3.95. (Actually, it’s not that old. It was published in 1968.)

Slater paints a portrait of a complex character – a man who is at once gay and straight, masculine and feminine, a lover of family and its destroyer, mother-identified and mother-loathing, victim and victimizer, monster and martyr, all-too-human being and transcendent god. Hercules – Heracles in Greek – is all this, because his myth changed as Greece evolved. He is a metaphor then for the birth of a nation. And more...

The Rock rolls in “Hercules”

August 10, 2014

"I like the gods,” my friend novelist and movie blogger Barbara Nachman says as we exit the new “Hercules,” starring Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, in the title role.

I do, too. The Greek gods were among my childhood companions, offering thrilling stories and transcendence without the guilt trip of modern religion. (A well-known classicist, who shall remain nameless here, once told me she would take the Greek gods over the Abrahamic one any day of the week and twice on Sundays, so to speak.)

This being the age of post-modernism, the gods are nowhere to be found in the new “Hercules,” and that’s too bad, because they’re such an entertaining lot and because the ancient Greeks believed in them – or at least the stories they could spin off of them – so passionately. (Certainly, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great did. He saw Hercules – Heracles in Greek, Hercules in Latin – as one of his paternal ancestors.)

Making a movie about an ancient Greek legend when you imply that the legend is really part PR campaign, part empowerment exercise, well, it doesn’t quite cut it, does it?

Otherwise, the new “Herc” is a not-bad movie that fits...

Awesomely athletic August

August 7, 2014

Summertime and the livin’ is supposed to be easy. (Thank you, Ira Gerswhin.) But for athletes and sports fans, there is no rest for the weary.

First, Phelpte (as in the Michael Phelps-Ryan Lochte rivalry) is back in action at the USA Swimming national long-course championships in Irvine, Calif., which will determine next year’s team for the world championships. They were slated to face-off four times, including Wednesday night’s 100-meter freestyle event.

The story lines go something like this: Phelps was bored in retirement and is glad to be back. Lochte – who turned 30 Aug. 3, Happy Birthday, Ryan! – moved to Charlotte, N.C., where he’s acquired a new coach and a new maturity, which should be music to fans’ ears. We’ll see how his newfound maturity and Phelps’ newfound hunger for swimming pan out.

Tonight, Colin Kaepernick leads the San Francisco 49ers into M&T Bank Stadium to meet the Baltimore Ravens for a nationally televised game that’s a rematch of Super Bowl XLVII. I am so there (i.e., in front of the tube) for this.

I wish I could be there (as in Cleveland) Friday for the start of the Gay Games (through Aug. 16), which always take place the same year as the Winter Olympics. But at least “Water Music,” my new novel about four gay athletes and how their professional rivalries color their personal relationships, will be there...

Will soccer eclipse football?

August 6, 2014

Today’s thought comes from my editor-friend Bill and my Uncle Johnny. As they uttered the same thought to me within hours of and unbeknownst to each other, I took it as a sign from the sports gods that I should write about it. And the thought is this:

We have seen the future in America, and it is soccer.

This because Manchester United and Real Madrid – perhaps the two best-known “football” teams in the world – faced off this past Saturday, Aug. 2, in a match at Michigan Stadium that drew more than 100,000 fans.

This is a sport in which you can see the passion and excitement on the faces of the players, which communicates to the fans, Bill told me. Not like a certain other sport in which the players wear helmets and are bent over much of the time.

Still soccer has a long way to go to supplant that other football game. For one thing, as this article makes clear, Major League Soccer doesn’t have the $49 million that Real Madrid has to pay Cristiano Ronaldo, the No. 1 player in the world. The money’s not there – yet.

But it could be, someday sooner rather than later, particularly as America becomes a more multicultural nation.

The NFL’s female trouble

August 4, 2014

Hard to believe but it’s already football season, and God, it’s off to a dreadful start, isn’t it, what with former coach and analyst Tony Dunghy saying he wouldn’t want Michael Sam, foreseeing trouble ahead for the NFL’s first openly gay player, and then Baltimore Raven Ray Rice getting a slap on the wrist for allegedly beating his wife in an Atlantic City elevator when she was still his fiancée.

This has been compounded by ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith saying that women should be careful not to provoke men, for which he received a week suspension. Now ESPN ombudsman Robert A. Lipsyte has weighed in, saying, “Smith’s attempts at coherency are often as exciting as Tim Tebow’s scrambling.”

OK, people, let’s start with the easiest of the problems here. Why drag Tim Tebow – a man who has never shown women anything but respect – into this? Here’s a guy who’s training hard, hoping to get back into the NFL, unwilling to give up on his dream. There’s something at once poignant and commendable about this. But the NFL culture – which rejected him – can’t stop making fun of him even as it uses him to draw eyeballs. Pathetic.

But there’s something more serious going on here.

Rafanole threatened

August 1, 2014

Sports’ greatest rivalry has hit a speed bump as Rafael Nadal pulled out of tournaments in Toronto and Cincinnati prior to the US Open due to an injured right wrist.

Even though Rafa’s a southpaw server, wrist injuries to the dominant and non-dominant hand alike are becoming more common as players engage in a power game that puts a lot of stress on the joints. This is particularly true in the case of Rafa, who has such an intense style of play.

This sets up a number of intriguing scenarios for the rest of the season. First, whatever Nole does – and remember he’s about to become a first-time father – he’s assured of remaining the No. 1-ranked player through the summer and probably through the rest of the year, because Rafa will not be able to defend the points he gained winning Toronto’s Rogers Cup and the Western & Southern Open in Mason, outside Cincy last year. (Under the ATP rankings system, if you can’t defend your points, you lose them.)

Secondly, this makes it harder for Rafa to defend his US Open title. He has never defended a Slam except for the French Open on his beloved clay, of course.