Domingo Germán, seen here in 2019, pitched a perfect game for the New York Yankees on June 28. Photograph by Keith Allison.
The Supreme Court made what critics would describe as some imperfect decisions in the week that New York Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán pitched a perfect game. While the two would seem unrelated, they both tell us a great deal about the unfairness and seeming randomness of life.
Read More“The Battle of Agincourt” from Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s “Chronique de France.” (circa 1495), manuscript on parchment.
“Game of Thrones” has returned, but I gave up on it after the first season. I found it sexist and misogynistic. If you’re going to show female nudity, then you have to show male nudity, as HBO did on “Rome.”
In any event, “GOT” had nothing on the Plantagenets, the Rolls-Royce of English royal families.
Read MoreBeen in a bit of a valley lately, and at such moments it helps to see who might be worse off. Ah, there we have it – The Metropolitan Opera. Its offices have been vandalized. It’s in tough contract negotiations with 15 unions. And it recently cancelled the fall simulcast of John Adams’ “The Death of Klinghoffer” into movie theaters worldwide after some Jewish groups protested the work might spark anti-Semitism.
“Klinghoffer” is based on the 1985 hijacking of the ship the Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front. The hijackers killed Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish-American passenger, then forced crew members to dump his body overboard. Even writing this years later brings back all the horror of it.
Adams’ opera, with a libretto by Alice Goodman, gives voice to both Klinghoffer and the terrorists. Some think the work anti-Semitic; others that it gives anti-Semitism an excuse. It has been controversial since it debuted in Brussels in 1991 and has caused a great deal of pain to Klinghoffer’s two surviving daughters.
My own view is that art should have a chance.
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We’re all patterns in the universe, swimmer Daniel Reiner-Kahn reasons in my new novel “Water Music.” But sometimes it’s only when we’re at the end of a journey – maybe even life’s journey – that we understand how the strands came together. At other times, we recognize how the strands fit as they’re being woven.
Last week, I had an onstage conversation with film critic Marshall Fine at the Emelin Theatre in Mamaroneck, N.Y. about the relationship between language and images after a screening of “Words and Pictures,” which opens this Friday, May 23. It’s the story of a tempestuous rivalry between a prickly artist (Juliette Binoche) and a showoff writer (Clive Owen). Four days later, the writer (me) and the artist (David Hutchinson) came together more happily at a reading from “Water Music” at The Lionheart Gallery in Pound Ridge. After, I opened up the floor for a discussion about David’s paintings and drawings there, which are based on the perverse writings of Jean Genet.
First, a few words about “Words and Pictures,” a rather contrived but nonetheless absorbing movie about a love-hate relationship that sparks a contest between the artist’s students and the writer’s. It occurred to me after that the only arena in which men and women compete is the intellectual one.
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