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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Read MoreWell, this is a first – the F-word, the S-word, the T-word and the P-word in political coverage. It all comes courtesy of the latest Donald Trump revelations – that in a hot-mike conversation with Billy Bush in 2005, Trump admitted to groping women.
I have to admit that I’m inured to his shenanigans by now. There are so many of them that I’ve grown a thick skin. What disturbs me here is not Trump, a lost cause, or the predictable blaming of Bill and Hillary Clinton as philanderer and enabler but the idea that this is just boys-will-be-boys banter. ...
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Read MoreEven casual readers of this blog will have surmised my passion for the Greeks in general and Alexander the Great in particular. So when I saw an ad for Times Journeys’ “The Legacy of Alexander the Great” tour on the back page of The New York Times one late winter day and learned that there was one single room left for the late summer voyage, I jumped at the chance.
Not. Even though it was Alexander, I kept finding excuses. Work, home, fear of flying, money, did I mention work? Besides, I needed the money to self-publish the second book in my series, “The Games Men Play.” I needed a sign. Then I got one in the form of a contract for the book. ...
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Read MoreDuring an idyllic Greek lunch overlooking the warm, teal Mediterranean Sea during Times Journeys’ recent “Legacy of Alexander the Great” tour, the conversation rolled around to Colin Kaepernick and his Anthem protest as a way to raise awareness of police violence against blacks. One of the Alexandrians in our group said that many in San Francisco view the protest as Kaepernick’s way of holding on to his job as backup quarterback of the city’s 49ers team as he isn’t very good.
But I don’t think Kaepernick is either that bad a quarterback – I believe he’ll be back as starter before December – or that Machiavellian a man. (I also think that there are easier ways to job advancement than turning yourself into the object of hatred that Kaepernick has become in some people’s eyes.)
Mostly, however, I take people at face value. If someone says he’s doing something for a particular reason, I believe him until proven otherwise. ...
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Read MoreIn “Clinton’s Sick Days” – a column in today’s New York Times about Hillary Clinton’s failure to disclose she has pneumonia before getting sick at New York’s 9/11 ceremony – Frank Bruni writes: “Her self-protection is a perverse form of self-destruction.”
While I would agree that she is a controlled and controlling woman – the result of having an open, philandering husband, the lack of power for women and her own Scorpio nature – that’s not what’s at play here. Or rather all that is at play here.
Women are raised to care for others. The not-so-subtle message is keep calm, carry on and don’t make a big deal of your cancer, recent surgery, etc. Lives are depending on you. ...
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Read MoreIt’s no accident that Warner Bros. released “Sully” on the weekend of 9/11.
The Clint Eastwood thriller – about the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson,” in which Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger guided a US Airways airbus, crippled by a bird strike, onto the icy waters of the river, thus saving all 155 souls on board – is 9/11 in reverse or, perhaps, come full circle. Instead of terrorists piloting planes into skyscrapers, Sully (the reliably excellent Tom Hanks), assisted by co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), sought to avert that catastrophe by heading toward the only unobstructed area, the open waters of the Hudson.
It’s giving nothing away, however, to say that the film opens with the alternative scenario. We watch the airbus pierce glass and steel with the sickening feeling that by now is all-too-familiar before we see Sully jolt awake. The alternative scenario is one of his nightmares so it doesn’t have to be ours. It is to Eastwood’s credit as a storyteller – working from a taut screenplay by Tom Komarnicki based on Sullenberger’s book, “Highest Duty” – that we see snatches of the accident and its heroic aftermath many times from many different perspectives before we see it unfold twice in real time. ...
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Read MoreIt was a beautiful day: That’s what I remember thinking. And it’s probably the first thing anyone who is old enough to remember it will tell you about it.
Seamless sky, what pilots call severe clear. Had to be. The men who brought those buildings down didn’t know how to pilot a plane beyond flying straight, so conditions had to be optimal. The day before, Sept. 10, it had rained. The next was a different story.
It had started promisingly enough. I was working on a piece about the 75th anniversary of the Chrysler Building – the favorite landmark of New Yorkers – and had a 7:30 a.m. interview with William Ivey Long, costume designer for the Broadway hit “The Producers,” whose designs for the show included a gown inspired by the building’s diadem top. Long was a terrific interview but soon excused himself for what he said was a busy day. Delighted with his remarks, I wished him joy of it. ...
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