As Lent ends and the Easter season begins today with Christians celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, TV has once again presented its share of documentaries and films about Jesus’ Passion.
PBS’ “Last Days of Jesus” offers a detailed consideration of what it meant to die by crucifixion. I now no longer watch such scenes, just as I no longer watch horror movies. “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” as President Bill Clinton put it at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, prefer to dwell on happier circumstances. Not that we eschew suffering. Indeed, the surest way to prolong suffering is the refusal to endure it. It’s just that we no longer feel the need to go out of our way to create or endure needless suffering. ...
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Read MoreOften in life you do something without realizing until later what it meant. When I wrote “The Penalty for Holding” (May 10, Less Than Three Press) – the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play” – I had several goals in mind. Sexy male-male romance? Check. A story that continued the series’ themes of power, dominance and rivalry? Check. A novel about leadership, the workplace and how violence in the workplace spills into everyday life? Check, check and check.
What I hadn’t counted on – what I hadn’t foreseen – was the return of isolationism that ushered in Brexit and Trump and that provides the context for the novel’s theme of belonging. And belonging is one of the great themes of our time. Who are we and where do we belong? For the answer to the first will determine the second. Or at least it should. ...
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Read MoreWhite House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has apologized for saying that Adolf Hitler didn’t gas his own people and, presumably, for adding that Hitler did bring them into the “Holocaust centers” – you know, the death camps with those nifty gift shops.
Spicer, of course, was awkwardly trying to set up one of the standard ploys of his boss, President Donald J. Trump, which is to throw someone under the bus by comparing that person to someone else who represents abject evil. Apparently, Trumpet has decided that Vladdie Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin’s sell-by date has arrived and thus needs to blame Russia for backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been roundly condemned for using chemical weapons on his people. ...
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Read MoreIt is perhaps no small irony that the culture that gave us “nothing in excess; everything in moderation” also gave us a literary masterpiece whose first word is “rage.”
The ancient Greeks were a mass of contradictions. But then, human nature is a mass of contradictions and the Greeks were nothing if not masters of plumbing the human condition as seen in “A World of Emotions, Ancient Greece, 700 B.C.-200 A.D.,” on view at the Onassis Cultural Center New York through June 24. ...
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Read MorePresident Donald J. Trump’s decision to respond to the chemical weapons attack in Syria with a bombardment of 59 Tomahawk missiles was the most presidential thing he has done so far. He’s not the first president to use an air strike as a form of gesture politics and, sadly, he won’t be the last.
But it had to be done. It’s what a President Hillary Clinton would’ve done. It’s what President Barack Obama should’ve done. What does it accomplish? Maybe nothing. But you cannot let chemical weapons go unnoticed. This year marks the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I, the Great War, in which millions were gassed. The response was “Never again.” And yet it has happened, again and again. ...
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Read MoreYears ago, I worked with a woman who was a very good writer. I remember one piece in particular, a column about a woman dying on the streets of Manhattan attended by strangers who belied the image of the cold-hearted New Yorker. It was a terrific piece of writing and I told this colleague as much. She snorted and shot me a look that suggested that and $1 would get her a cup of coffee. I took no offense. Her defining quality was a bitter frustration that stemmed from her being the mistress of one of the company’s higher-ups. Ironically, though her situation had gotten her foot in the door, it had also locked her into a clerical job for fear of the appearance of favoritism that the staff writing job she coveted would’ve surely provoked.
Apart from the clerical job, all her sleeping her way to the middle had really earned her was the contempt and merciless gossip of the women she worked with. I being a newbie and of a different temperament didn’t hate her. But I pitied her, which was perhaps far worse. ...
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Read MoreThe painting shows a young black man in a coffin, his face a blur of color in the manner of Abstract Expressionist art – and violent death.
The departed, then, is not just someone who has succumbed to the ills that the flesh is heir to. Emmett Till was just 14 years old when he was lynched by two white men for flirting with the wife of one of them. “Open Casket, “ on view at the Whitney Biennial, is Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting of a mutilated Till in the open casket his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on. The work has drawn protests and condemnation from black artists and writers, who question the right of a white woman to appropriate a searing moment in black history. ...
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